Long story short, it is time to start saving some pennies and get on top of my spending. I honestly have no idea how much I spend on what each month.

Lloyds offer a “Money Manager” tool with online banking to categorize spending which appears useful, at least to see where the expenditures are. I was just wondering if there are any other tools/ software/ resources that are useful for keeping track of spending and saving more effectively? I am not obsessive enough to enter every transaction in to a spread sheet each day though 😉

I suspect the Lloyds tool will at least help but was just curious as to the other options out there.

Thanks!

microsoft money has all of this and future planning tools to help you along

Why don’t you just print off your last 6 mths statements and go through where your money has gone?

Categorise into essential and non essential expenditure.

Work out what non essential stuff you’ll stop spending money on.

You could then even look at ways of reducing essential expenditure (cheaper gas/elec company, cheaper mobile deal etc.)

Doing it for the past is easy enough but it would be nice if there is something keeping track of the pennies as you go, to not have do do everything retrospectively. This is where the Lloyds Money Manager looks good.

The honest answer is probably most of our money is going on food shopping and then the odd large expenditure when a bit of bike breaks! Both of these could probably be reduced slightly but would probably be called “essential” in our eyes even thought they are not strictly.

This is pretty relevant to my interests tbf

We just use a normal spreadsheet. This outlines all the essential costs like food and utilities (fixed expenditure) and in a seperate column I put all the things we have to save for – car tax (£10/month), Christmas (£50), heating oil (£50), Summer holiday etc.
Add the two totals up, take it away from income and voila, that’s your spare.
The trick is to be really thorough covering all upcoming expenditure in the savings column (we also include a little bit for car tyres and servicing etc).
Also if you’re putting your savings in an ISA watch out for the interest rate plumetting after the first year – shift and lift.