Lots of personal finance experts recommend tracking everything you spend for a certain period of time — usually a month — as a way of benchmarking your spending habits. One thing that can derail this exercise is making things too complicated or detailed every day. If it isn't easy, you won't do it. I certainly have trouble doing it.
A couple of tricks we've used to corral the receipts:
1) Ask for a receipt with everything. Have the cashiers hand the receipt to you rather than put it in with the package. This keeps all of your records in one place, temporarily.
2) Get a big huge nail. Pound it into a piece of scrap wood, and turn it upside-down. Impale the receipts on the nail daily. This can be satisfying. Just don't impale yourself.
3) Or, if you have small children (or adults who act like small children) put them in a fish bowl, or if you want to organize a little as you go along, a categorized coupon organizer. The categories we used were CAR, DINING, HOUSE, MEALS, AND MISC. These included most shopping items; you can change them to suit your spending habits.
These steps get you over the biggest hurdle — keeping the records for your daily purchases. The other bills (water, electric, cable, mortgage, etc.) you're probably keeping track of already.Once you have the records, then you can analyze. That part may be harder to deal with emotionally (“I spent $2,563 on COFFEE?!”), but at least it's straightforward.
