One Caveman’s Financial Journey

After the turmoil of our daughter’s birthday and the Christmas season, January promised relief from the stress of the hustle-and-bustle. The pleasant surprise that January also brought is that we had our first “black” month in nearly a year. Even with the surprise expenses of needing a new microwave and getting socked with [...]

It’s been two weeks to the day since I last posted about watching the utility company walk away with my hard-earned money. I have to say, that was a very demoralizing day. After dealing with that fiscal blow, I just didn’t feel like doing any writing on top of my normal daily efforts.
Then, [...]

I have finally uploaded the first version of the Expense Report spreadsheet. It’s not much, yet, but with your input and suggestions, I will definitely make improvements.
The goal of this spreadsheet is simple: Input every single cent that leaves your person. In order to get accurate data, you must track every single penny [...]

*** Note: The spreadsheet is complete and uploaded. You can find out more in the post about it.
Sorry about the delay in releasing the Expense Tracking Spreadsheet. In the process of preparing a sample spreadsheet, I realized I should probably write a tutorial of how to actually use it. It uses pivot [...]

This month we began closely tracking all of our expenses for the first time. We knew that we would be in for a few surprises, but if we were going to reign in our expenses we had to be willing to embarrass ourselves to find the truth.
We have always used Quicken to track our [...]