How I track my finances

I’ve been tracking my finances to a tee since 2022. That’s when I moved in with my girlfriend, now my fiancée, and we started sharing household expenses while keeping separate bank accounts. I needed visibility into shared finances for the first time. Before that, I lived alone and my spending was predictable enough that I didn’t track anything.

My system has a couple of layers: daily logging in an app, annual projections in a calculator app, quarterly breakdowns for irregular expenses, net worth tracking in a different app. It took a little while to figure out what goes where, now it runs on autopilot and it’s been working out well for me.

How I think about tracking #

After a few years of doing this, I’ve come to realize that tracking money can serve three different purposes:

Control: Am I spending less than I’m earning? Am I hitting my savings goals? This requires minimal effort. I just need totals and red flags.

Insight: Where is my money actually going? What patterns do I see? This requires more work. I need categories, trends, monthly comparisons.

Optimization: How can I spend less or allocate better? This probably requires the most attention and adjustment.

I optimize for control and awareness. My categories are stable, and my spending patterns have been consistent since 2022. (This is also when I started building a tracking system for work and eventually life.) I don’t need to constantly optimize because thankfully I’ve already built healthy habits. What I need is to maintain them and catch outliers before they compound.

I do track every transaction in detail: every coffee, every meal, every purchase. It sounds tedious, but like a lot of things in my systems, this has become second nature at this point. I don’t have that many transactions a day anyway, so logging takes like a minute.

The system #

I use a mix of apps. Dime for daily expense tracking, Wallet for net worth tracking once a month, and Numi for annual tracking, projections, and quarterly breakdowns. I prefer an app like Numi over traditional spreadsheets because I can just type and calculate without navigating through cells and columns. While I’m sure spreadsheets are more powerful, they just feel archaic to me. Apps like Dime and Wallet are better for things I check regularly on my phone. Numi is better for calculations and projections I interact with less frequently.

The setup has four main components plus daily logging:

Daily logging in Dime: This is the iOS app where I track predictable monthly expenses. Rent, utilities, groceries, dining out, transportation, health and beauty, entertainment, household stuff. I log things as they happen or at the end of the day.

Some categories are just mine, marked with asterisks in the app for distinction: personal shopping, hangouts with my friends and coworkers, subscriptions, gifts, miscellaneous. These don’t count toward our shared household budget. My fiancée and I split the shared categories, and we each have our own budgets for personal spending.

Cash inflow in Numi: I track all money coming in throughout the year. Salary, bonuses, gifts, bank interest, credit card cashback and rebates, and reimbursements from shared expenses. I also project expected interest and compare it against actual amounts every couple of months. This helps me set realistic annual income goals and see if I’m on track.

Ad hoc expenses in Numi: Starting this year, I split this into four separate quarterly pages instead of one consolidated tracker. Each quarter gets its own page in Numi. I only track irregular or large purchases here — anything 500K VND (~$20) or more like tech upgrades, big shopping trips, gifts, random big-ticket items that don’t fit into monthly budgets. (The threshold isn’t fixed, for now it’s just a concrete figure for me to work off of.) Anything under 500K VND is either regular enough for Dime or small enough that it doesn’t need separate attention. When I sell old gear, I track that as a negative entry.

I set a rough quarterly budget for ad hoc expenses. It’s not rigid, but if for some reason I’m burning through it too fast, that’s my signal to adjust.

I switched to quarterly tracking for more precise exchange rate tracking (I make purchases in USD for apps and services) and mental relief. When Q1 ends, I export it to PDF, save it in my yearly folder and move on. That quarter is done. I don’t have to keep looking at 12 months of data.

Travel in Numi: Each trip gets its own separate page. I track the full cost: flights, hotels, food, activities, everything. This way I can see what a vacation actually costs without it getting buried in other categories or spread across multiple months.

Net spending rollup in Numi: At the end of each month, I manually add up the final monthly expense number from Dime, plus the quarterly ad hoc expenses (when it’s a new quarter), plus any trips and travel costs. This gives me total annual spending. At the end of the year, I export everything to PDFs and save them in a folder. Then I start fresh for the next year.

What I don’t track #

I don’t compare month-over-month spending or optimize individual categories. My patterns are stable enough that I’d notice if something spiked. But 2025 was an expensive year: tech upgrades for both of us, a trip to Europe, multiple domestic trips, visiting my family for the holidays. I realized I needed better visibility into irregular spending. So for 2026, I switched to quarterly ad hoc tracking with a concrete budget. No major tech upgrades planned this year, so the quarterly budget should give me an early warning if spending starts creeping up.

Why this works for me #

I like having separate contexts for different types of expenses. Daily recurring stuff lives in my phone. Big irregular purchases get their own quarterly space, income projections happen on a different page, and having them only on my laptop is enough.

Being crystal clear about money has always been important to me. This system gives me that clarity without demanding more time and attention than it’s worth. I know where I stand, I know if I’m on track. And when something feels off, I have the data to figure out why. That’s worth the 10 minutes a week it takes to maintain.