In this episode, I’m challenging you to track your finances for one week. I know the idea of jotting down every expense might feel overwhelming or even intimidating, but this exercise isn’t about judgment or shame—it’s about creating a budget that aligns with your lifestyle and financial goals.
I’ll walk you through a simple five-day exercise to help you become more aware of your spending habits. By tracking your daily expenses, you’ll get a clear picture of where your money is going, whether it’s online shopping sprees or forgotten autopayments. You might be surprised by what you find, and that’s totally okay! Building financial awareness is a key step toward stress-free spending, and this one-week challenge is here to help you understand your numbers better.
Are you ready to start my five-day finance challenge? Learn how understanding spending habits is essential to hit your financial goals…
- [0:30] Benefits of tracking your expenses
- [03:30] How to do the 5-day challenge
- [11:58] What to do after you complete the exercise
Tune into this episode of Money Files to join my five-day finance challenge and get a deeper understanding of your spending.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved this episode on Smart Spending: A Simple 5-Day Challenge, check out my episode, Aligning Expenses with Values: How to Conduct a Cost Saving Audit!
Transcript for “Smart Spending: A Simple 5-Day Challenge”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. Today I want to ask you to do something that you might be scared to do. I actually want you to spend this next week observing your finances and I want you to observe your finances by actually spending the time to track your expenses. I want to elaborate on tracking your expenses because I think that sometimes when we think about tracking our expenses, we think about it as this big task and this big to-do. But I actually ask all of my clients when I first start working with them, like for a couple of weeks, I ask them to track their expenses and I’m asking them to track their expenses for a reason that maybe you haven’t thought about. I asked them to track their expenses because I want to bring awareness for how they’re spending their money.
I actually had a call with a client today who just started working with me and she’s like, Keina, you know what I noticed from tracking my expenses is that money pours out of me like water and I like died laughing because I’d never heard anyone explain it like that. She was like, I knew I spent a lot of money, but I didn’t know how much money I spent. And so tracking your expenses can bring awareness, but the awareness that I want to bring to the center, into the forefront in this exercise that I’m going to ask you to do in tracking your expenses, is to help you get rid of fake math in your budget. So if you’ve heard me talk about fake math on any of my other podcast, you already know what fake math is. If you are new here, hello. Thank you for tuning in.
Fake math is really, it’s something that you don’t mean to do, but it’s when you sit down and you attempt to get your budget together, whatever that may look like for you, you start making guesstimations in your budget. You guesstimate how much you pay for auto insurance, how much your auto registration is, you guesstimate how much you spend on groceries. And so your budget is full of guesstimations. But because you haven’t gone back to actually check the math on it, it means that you’re not actually working with real numbers. You are just working with numbers that you pulled out of your head and you haven’t gone back to fact check those anywhere. And so fake math is really about the oversights that you have in your budget because you’re not really aware how money is moving. One of my other clients that I’m working with right now, we were going through her actual bank account and we noticed a $21 charge and I was like, Hey, do you know what this is?
She’s like, no, I was actually wondering that same thing. And so we did a search in her bank account. For the last year she’s had this $21 charge that she is unaware that’s coming out of her bank account because when I talk to clients, when they tell me they’re checking their bank account, they’re not actually checking what’s coming in and out of their bank account. What they’re really checking is their bank account balance. They are checking to make sure that they have enough money to pay their bills. They’re checking to make sure that the balance in their bank account is above zero. And so that is very different than watching how money moves in and out of your account.
So the exercise I’m going to ask you to do is to actually track how money is moving in and out of your hands. So some of that money is going to be moving by you making a transaction, if you’re going to Sonic, I’m in Oklahoma right now so that’s why Sonic is the thing that comes to mind. Or if you go to Nordstrom or you make a purchase online, like some of that stuff is going to be happening with day-to-day transactions that you make. But I also want you to be observing the things that come out of your account automatically. And so that’s why I want you to track your expenses for a week. You can actually go to my show notes. I have an old resource that I think that will still be really great and beneficial. So I’m going to ask you to track your expenses for five days. So you can go and download my Financial Habit Tracker. It’s like a cute little worksheet that walks you through a very similar exercise but what I want you to do is literally you can do this in a note on your phone.
You can open up a Google sheet and create a tab that says day one, day two, day three, you could do it on a piece of paper. I don’t care how you get it done, you can do it in a journal. But I want you to just develop a habit over the next five days where you decide that you’re going to be curious about how money is moving in your life. And the reason that we’re doing this is because I want to help you be able to observe the areas in your life where you’re spending money that you are maybe forgetting to think about or you haven’t really noticed, or you are just looking at your bank account balance and you’re not actually checking to see what contributes to that bank account balance. So what you’re going to do for day one is you are going to write down any expenses or purchases that you made that day.
So you’re going to write down the expense, you’re going to write down the amount, and you are also going to write down like how you paid for it. Was it an auto debit, was it a cash payment? Was it your debit card, was it your credit card? But you’re literally going to track your expenses. So the things that you’re out doing while you’re out and about, you’re using Apple Pay, you’re using your Google Wallet, you’re going to keep track of those things immediately, because you’re going to be out and about doing them. But then the extra commitment that I want you to make is I also want you to go to your bank account at the end of the day or you can do the app on your phone, but like sign in and see what transactions have come out of your account that you wouldn’t have necessarily noticed because they’re on an auto debit.
I want you to look at your credit card, see what transactions have come out because they’re on an auto charge cycle. So you’re going to do this same thing for five days straight. You’re going to track, like I said, the expense, the amount and how you’re paying for it. And what I want you to do at the end of each day is I want you to reflect on, were there any surprises with how I was spending money for the state or things that came out of my account. Like my client, we talked today and she had this $21 charge coming out of her account, that was a surprise for her. We were trying to figure out why is this actually coming out of her account. Another surprise was that she had a $6 rocket money charge. We had already talked about her canceling that charge so it wouldn’t be charged again. So that was another surprise for her. But you have surprises like that, that come out of your account.
It could be that you went out to eat. The amount that you were charged by the restaurant isn’t actually reflective of what you signed on the receipt. And so those are the things that you’re paying attention to as you’re capturing some of your surprises. Another surprise might be is like, oh, I noticed that I got a deposit for my job. I think it’s a reimbursement for my travel, like that could be another surprise for you that you notice in your bank account because you’re actually taking the time to look at money that is moving in your bank account and not just looking at the bank account balance. And a challenge that you might capture is like, oh my goodness, I had a ticket that I forgot to pay. And so that was a challenge for me and I was like trying to think about how I was going to figure that out or another challenge that happened for me was that I forgot that I needed to make an estimated tax payment. Whatever that is, you can name whatever challenges you saw for yourself that day when you’re thinking about your finances.
And then finally, at the end of the day, I also want you to reflect on your emotions. I want you to ask yourself like, how was I feeling today? So when you go back and you look at the expenses, especially the ones that you actually made that day that aren’t like an auto draft, like if you ended up at Target, if you ended up going to your favorite coffee shop and you ate out for lunch and you DoorDash for dinner, whatever that may be. If that were my day, I can tell you that my emotions is, I was probably pretty drained because I’m not someone who eats out generally speaking like three times in the same day or I could have been drained, I might have felt really like overwhelmed or it might just have been, I could have actually felt really great if it coincided with like friends coming into town. And so like maybe those were a little bit more planned for me, but just being able to identify like how was I feeling throughout the day and being able to reflect on that is going to help you also start to understand where your emotions start to play with your spending.
So you’re going to take this same frame that I just gave you where you have a day one tracking and you’re going to do this exercise for five days. So you’re just going to repeat the same thing over and over again for five days. I want to invite you on day three to actually start looking at, now that you’ve done the exercise, like okay, I’ve done it for day one, I’ve done it for day two. I want to invite you on day three to start looking at your spending. I want you to look at what expenses did you have that were planned and what expenses did you have that were unplanned? So you can start to think about where with my spending do I have some, like what I call peaks because I decided that I didn’t want to eat at home and so I ordered food out or I just had to buy the thing that I saw on Instagram, I had to go immediately to Amazon and buy it.
I would call the outfit that you ordered, the pens that you ordered, the journal that you ordered, whatever that is. I would call that an unplanned expense. And so you can start to see for the next like day three, day four, day five, where you have expenses that are planned and where you have expenses that are unplanned. And just being able to see with your day to day spending on day three, day four, day five, what are you noticing? What’s your ratio of unplanned to planned expenses? Do you notice yourself being more thoughtful about how you’re spending money day to day or do you notice that I’m actually not really intentional and I’m not as thoughtful as I think that I am about my expenses. So that’s what the unplanned versus planned markup is going to do for you and is going to help you see about how you spend money.
So after the five days, what I really want you to do is really reflect on how did it feel to actually track my expenses? What did I actually learn about my money habits? Where am I seeing fake math show up in my life? Like where have I guesstimated on some things? Maybe I guessed that I spent a hundred dollars eating out, but what I really see is that in a week’s time I’m spending like $120. So there’s no way that in a month I’m spending a hundred dollars eating out. Or maybe you guesstimated that you are spending, $20 a week in gas because that’s what you were spending back in 1998. But as you actually look and you’re at the pump, you realize, wow, I actually fill up my car twice a week and it’s costing me like $40 every single time I go to the pump.
So I’m really spending $80 a week on gas. And so I need to go back to, like when I go back to create a budget, I need to actually put in $320 because I’m spending $80 a week on gas. So those are the reflections and the connections that you’re going to make to help you understand by observing my finances. And notice I’m not telling you to judge yourself at all in this. This is not about shaming, this is about helping you find, where can I actually find the real numbers that I need to use that help me change my budget. So my budget is actually a reflection of how I actually spend money and not a reflection of how I think I spend money, because that’s where the fake math comes in. And an app isn’t going to do this for you friends.
So some of you are going to say, Keina, I am going to sit down and I’m going to pool all of my expenses and I’m going to color code. No, we don’t need to do any color coding. This is an active exercise that you can do right now and it’s an active exercise that I want you to do right now because it is easier to look at what I’m doing day to day than to go back and tell yourself that I’m going to look at the last 90 days of how I spent money. I don’t want you to overwhelm yourself with looking at the last 90 days. There’s a time and a place to look at the last 90 days of how you spent money, but you can learn a lot from how you’re spending money right now. And that’s what I want you to take the opportunity to do is like, let me actually look at how I’m spending money right now. What am I learning about what I’m spending in a five day period?
If you wanted to, you could repeat this exercise for another five days because you are going to gather information about yourself. I always tell my clients like your budget is a working document. It is not something that you are going to put up on a shelf and memorialize, your budget is a working document and it’s a tool for you to always go back and shift. You are going to have seasons in your life that change. And so you want to be able to have a budget that changes with you. And so when you learn to actually observe how money is moving in your life, you’re going to know exactly how you want to shift and you want to observe the numbers in your life and how they’re moving. And that’s how we start to eradicate fake math. Fake math doesn’t have to be something that sticks with you always. It’s something that you can change.
So I invite you to do this exercise. If you do this exercise, I would love for you to email me. You can email me at Keina@wealthovernow.com and just send me a message. I would love to know your ahas and if you want to take this work deeper, I would definitely encourage you to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. I’m going to make sure that you budget for the last time by helping you get rid of fake math. So you don’t have to be worried about like, oh my goodness Keina I’ve budgeted so many times before, or I’m just trying to get an app. When you learn how to actually see the real math in your numbers and understand where your money is going, you are going to fall in love with budgeting and you’re going to understand why I say budgeting is therapeutic. So thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode and I look forward to talking to you next week.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
