[symbogra]

I used to do this during my first real job and was tracking every sandwich I bought, then one of the senior engineers told me to stop wasting time with it and make more money, and then I was enlightened.

[miroljub]

Here's another enlightenment for you:

Tracking expenses doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes per day, if you do it daily. With the correct workflow, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes per month. There are even apps that would do that for you without any effort, though not so perfectly as fine tuned apps.

And now, the enlightenment part: how is expense tracking preventing you from making more money than visiting hecker news, reddit, social media, listening to the radio, watching TV, reading the news, or a million other things? Do you really spend all your waking hours earning more money so tracking expenses for a few minutes would make you make less?

[ajb]

This begs the question though, of why individuals still need to do this like a 17th century clerk, when it costs their counterparties fractions of a man-second. Imagine if their was a law which said, every business that takes a credit card has to supply the consumer with the data in standard, machine-processable format (ie not pdf) via their credit account (IE, not making obtaining their email address a condition).

[BeetleB]

And then you get married and have kids and wonder why you have trouble paying the bills despite having a household income in the top 5%.

Then you discover that you really do need to know how much you are spending on sandwiches.

I went through this a bunch of times. Always hoping for an obvious smoking gun expense I could just cut. It always was many little things adding up.

[StopDisinfo910]

If your income is in the top 5% and you struggle paying bills, it's nearly always an issue with to much of your money stuck in mandatory expense: you are over mortgaged, or have to many car loans, or pay too much for the kids schools.

Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard but small expenses are rarely the root cause.

[tonyedgecombe]

Not that a sandwich will make much difference but you have to remember that employers like their staff to be indebted, it makes them compliant.

[tossandthrow]

It is not really binary.

I hate budgeting and still save around half my salary.

Though I do realize that this is a different game for some people, where some need it more than others.

[alexnewman]

Agreed this style of making money may have made sense when the world was more Sane but there’s no way to penny pinch yourself into a house in 2026

[michaelrpeskin]

25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive about $100/month at best. Tracking it allowed us to not go negative.

As soon as we got real jobs with a real income, we didn't waste time with that. Our philosophy now is to just make sure that we spend well under our means and not track. We don't penny-pinch, but we still keep some of the grad school "do I really need this?" mentality.

Our normal spending is somewhere under 1/2 of our take-home (including mortgage), so we just don't worry about it and keep saving. It helps that we don't have fancy tastes. It's a nice stress free way of saving and we don't have to get neurotic about tracking every penny either.