How much time do you spend budgeting and tracking spending?

I'm a huge nerd who actually enjoys budgeting and tracking my spending, so I do it almost every day... but it only takes me about 5 minutes a day. It took awhile to set up initially, but the maintenance is very minimal.

For several years I hand-entered transactions in Quicken and used a separate spreadsheet for budgeting. I probably spent a few hours a month, mostly processing an ugly pile of receipts all at once. It worked, but it was no fun. After testing several alternatives I recently switched to http://www.youneedabudget.com/ which replaces both Quicken and my old spreadsheet, and is simpler and more pleasant to use. I also got the companion iPhone app, so I can enter transactions while I'm out instead of bringing home a pile of receipts or scribbling notes about small cash purchases. Each transaction takes a few moments to enter. My wife and I review the numbers and adjust the budget over dinner once a month. Any system is going to require a chunk of learning curve / setup time at the start. After you've built a cash buffer you'll be able to automate a lot of the bill paying, which will ease things substantially. You're thinking of this as a time suck, but you're discounting the time you now spend on your paycheck-to-paycheck balancing act & crisis management. On balance, you're going to save time. These are tasks that I hate How do you know you hate them if you don't do them? Once you get your bearings and take control, you may be surprised at how your feelings about this stuff shift.

My partner uses https://www.mint.com/ to track spending into categories. I don't think he has to put too much time into this now, as he has it all set up. Electronic account tracking does a lot to automate this, as well.

I spend essentially no time at all on them (I mean, I do occasionally think about money). This is how my system works: 1) direct deposit paychecks (auto-funds 401k, too). 2) automatically pay all bills. 3) Automatically pay savings account. 4) Spend whatever's leftover on whatever I want. You don't need to track spending if you've met all your goals before you even get to that point. Step three is key (and the parenthesized part of step 1). Also key is that I don't have credit cards or other revolving debt to worry about. If I did, I would still just auto-pay those in step 2 at an accelerated rate instead of doing step three, and then when they were paid off, switch to auto-funding a savings account. How much money you make and how much your expenses are also come into play here.

Just echoing the idea that you don't HAVE to track any more than you want to track. I think your ultimate goal here is "have more savings and plan for the future". Tracking is just a tool to help you get there. You may be able to do that without tracking anything other than how much money you're putting into savings. As Jessamyn said, if you know you're overspending on beer or clothes or movies, you can make a decision to cut back on that category and put that overspending into savings instead, without having to track exactly how much you're spending on that category (or any other category). Tracking just helps you figure out where you CAN cut spending, if you don't have an obvious place to cut back. It also helps you know what you're likely to spend in the future, but you may already have a good sense of that. ("I bring home $x after taxes; at the end of the year, it's basically gone; therefore, I'm currently spending about $x a year.") You probably already know what your biggest expenses are (rent? insurance? groceries?). Do the big obvious things account for most of your spending, or do you find you're blowing through your paycheck with no idea where it went? If you don't feel like you know where you're money's going, simply tracking the past year's spending can tell you that - but you don't HAVE to track everything going forward. If you realize you're spending $1000 a month on comic books and you had no idea it was that much, you can just give yourself a $200 a month comic book budget and pop the rest into savings. Without tracking anything else, you've just moved closer to your goal. Good luck - you can do this, and it'll be much less painful than you think!

I set aside one hour a month for 'financial review', where I reconcile various accounts. It's actually pretty quick and easy; most of my transactions are on a credit card with a decent banking API. I pull up my finances at other times in the month, but that's mainly because I'm working on selling a bunch of video games and optimizing investments and taxes, or figuring out if I can loan money to family, etc. As a lot of people are pointing out, your challenge isn't the ongoing maintenance, but the initial setup. You'll need to set up categories or books, and classify some amount of history. mint.com pretty much requires that you let them handle the automation. I use GNUCash because I'm a Linux nerd and banking security paranoid, and it does a decent job for me now that I've given it enough data by manually classifying things. I know that tracking spending and budgeting are the way out of this trap Budgeting isn't magic. Basically there's two kinds of scenarios: overpaying and underconsuming. Everyone figures the solution is underconsuming, ie no more Starbucks ever, when especially for people who hate budgeting, there's a good chance you're probably overpaying for something. For your biggest expenses, comparison shopping makes a hell of a lot of sense. It cut my mom's car insurance in half, and it was the fourth quote that did it. The other common overpaying story is overdraft fees. Paying even 5 dollars to effectively borrow a hundred dollars for a day is clearly a worse deal than borrowing on a credit card at 29.99 percent. How much time does this activity take in order to have a clear picture of your finances and adequately plan for the future? I'd say about two hours with good software. Probably less if you follow koahiatamadl's guide, which is roughly how I big picture budget. But for people without three month's expenses in their checking account, a short term plan of action is called for. What I do is set up recurring transactions, and have them show up on the day they're planned for 30 days in advance. Paychecks, rent, utilities, loan payments, the more you can automate the better. Transaction history helps you figure out how much and how often, and the recurring transaction sets up 90 percent of 'the plan'. I use savings and credit to smooth the bumps in the plan, when annual expenses double or triple up.

Just popped in to nth Mint. I used to hate this stuff, but having a little app on my phone makes it almost a game. The program is pretty smart, too, and will figure out a lot of stuff for you (like categories, or which payments are bills). The initial setup took maybe an hour and now the longest I ever spend on it is 10 minutes.

I have two google spreadsheets - one for my monthly budget and one for my overall debt/financial goals (I have a lot of student loan debt). I spend about 5 minutes a day on the monthly budget, and maybe 15 minutes a month thinking about my overall debt and financial goals. The thing with saving money and managing debt is that time is really of the essence if you want to maximize the net money you end up with in the end. Meaning interest will compound on your savings accounts as well as your debts. So it really is quite important to start doing this as soon as you can possibly make yourself.

Well, I'm fundamentally a lazy person, I get bored by my finances and I have never found the need to actually maintain a detailed record of every penny I spend. And I don't think you need to do that on an ongoing basis - others will disagree. But you do need to get a good handle on your money overall and one way to do it would be this. Set aside at least half a day, in the near future and: - analyse your spending in the last couple of months, including stuff you pay in cash - be as detailed as possible - small stuff like a daily Starbucks visit do add up over the course of the month. If you don't normally keep all your receipts start to keep them religiously for a while to allow you to do this. - go through your bank and card statements for the last 12 months and identify any one off/quarterly payments not captured by the above analysis (insurance premiums, car maintenance or repairs, road tax or utilities for example) - use this information to do yourself an annual budget - just slot income and expense categories (per your analysis) in rows, extrapolate for 12 months, including you the one off/quarterly payments, slot in your monthly income in the top row and work out the difference. Work out the annual difference, too. In order to build up savings you need a positive figure at the bottom, i.e. income less expenses leaves you with spare income , at least over the course of 12 months. By the sound of it your figure at the moment will roughly zero. You can do this on a piece of paper if you don't like spreadsheets - a spreadsheet has the advantage that you can play 'what if' more easily and make changes and see their impact immediately. This allows you to do two things: 1/ You can add up all your annual/quarterly costs, round the figure up to allow for costs going up/for anything you've missed and divide by 12. This amount is your minimum 'savings' to spread the cash flows evenly over the course of the year. So the annual car insurance premium payment is budgeted for every month and you don't need to use the insurer's expensive finance option to spread it for you. This should mean you won't ever have to dip into your overdraft facility (if you have one) for example. Problem is you still are living from pay check to pay check. 2/ So you still need to work out how much money you want to save on a monthly basis to build up some savings that are actual savings. Using your detailed analysis you should be able to work out what costs you can cut out easily to achieve it. See point re Starbucks above. After cutting out all the easy stuff my next step would be to work out if my utility costs are reasonable or not and what else you can get a new quote for to save money easily without feeling the pain. Then you look at what things are least painful to cut out...you see where I'm going with this. Play with it until you have identified enough costs to cut out to cover your savings goal. Then you implement your savings goal. You set up a standing order which transfers the total of amounts in point 1 + 2 above into your savings account on payday. You are only allowed to transfer money out of the savings account for the bills identified in point one. The rest stays in the savings account. You are not allowed to spend more money than you have in your checking account, ever. If that means you eat only beans on toast for the last week of the month and watch tv because you haven't money to go out hat's what you do. If you are thorough when you do this and implement conscientiously you won't have to touch it again unless stuff changes, i.e. your income changes, your rent goes up or whatever and thus the figures need to change as a result. Then you work out how much your figures need to change and change the monthly standing order into your savings account accordingly. So in answer to your question - spend a few hours to actually work out what the status quo is in terms of spending and what it needs to be to allow you to meet your savings goal and then revisit periodically.