Why Should I Track My Spending?

“Why should I track my spending?”  I get that question all the time!  Whenever I take my phone out to enter a transaction when I’m out with friends, I always get comments.  “I don’t want to know how much I’m spending” or “My husband would kill me if he knew everything I spent!”.  So why do I want to know?

When Craig and I made a conscious  decision to really try to save money, we made a pact.  We would track everything we spent on a daily basis, and then after a month or so, we would look back so that we could see where all of our money was going.  Tracking everything I spent took some getting used to.  I had never even given it any thought.  But once I started tracking it, I was more hesitant to spend freely.  I started thinking, “Maybe I really don’t need to go to the mall today.”

After the month was up, we looked back at our spending and we were amazed.  We spent so much money on dining out!!  I had no idea that we were spending that much money.  We decided to use the “budget tracker” that Craig developed and keep tracking our spending.  Pretty soon it became a habit.  As soon as I finished a transaction, I entered it into my phone.  I came to depend on seeing the balance and knowing exactly how much we had left to spend.

Experts agree that recognizing spending habits and trends is necessary to spending less than you earn and to staying on track towards your savings goals.  By tracking your spending, you can look back to see exactly where your money is going.  This is key to making smarter financial decisions.  Families need to work together to make a concerted effort to track their spending and to be honest with one another about their spending.  Spending more than you earn, leading to overdrafts and credit card fees, can do irreparable damage to your financial health.

When we decided to develop Spense to help track our spending, we wanted to include a balance so that we would always know how much we have left to spend.  We decided how much we wanted to keep our spending below for our two week cycle, and then have every transaction come out of that amount.  The updated balance on the home screen allows us to know exactly how successful we are being at staying under our spending target.  This knowledge is imperative to making smart financial decisions.

Several times I have decided to stop tracking my spending for a month or so to see how I did.  I was shocked at the difference in our spending when I didn’t enter my transactions into Spense!  Before we started tracking our spending, we were close to overdrawing our account each pay period.  When I stopped tracking my spending, we went immediately back to our old habits.  It didn’t feel good!  I tried to keep a running balance in my head of what I had spent, but it was nowhere near the correct amount.  The financial decisions I was making were not smart, and were damaging our ability to save money and work towards our financial goals.

When I don’t track my spending and keep an eye on my balance, I feel blind.  It makes every transaction stressful.  “Will it go through?  Do I have enough money in my account to cover this?”  When I use Spense to track my expenses, I know exactly how much is in my spending target, and the stress is removed.  No more worrying, and I know instantly if I can afford to go out to dinner, or if I should wait until the next spending cycle.

Tracking your expenses puts you in control of your finances.  You know instantly what you are spending, and you know instantly how much you have left to spend.  Isn’t that better than wondering?

The Budget Tracker

After Craig and I had been using the “budget tracker” for a couple of years, we had a crazy thought.  If we were able to use it and save money, would others be able to as well?  In January 2012, we started thinking about turning the program that was just for us into an iPhone app that we could put on the App Store.  We bought a Mac, Craig got his developer’s license and we got started.

Little did we know that it would be 9 long months before Spense would become a reality.  Hours of brainstorming, design sessions, late nights of programming, questions and more questions taught us that developing an app in our basement was not an easy task.

Many of those hours were spent trying to come up with a name for our app.  So many finance apps out there already had “expense” or “budget” in their names.  We knew we couldn’t use “budget tracker.”  We wanted to stand out.  We finally came up with Spense, a combination of “spending” and “expense”.

I spent many frustrating days with photo manipulation and graphic design software only to realize that creating a logo and icon were beyond my capabilities.  We decided to hire a graphic designer, because we knew that the icon would be the first thing that draws people to our app on the App Store.  Amy Ottalagano of Amy Lee Graphic Designs worked tirelessly with us for months on developing something simple but eye catching.  We couldn’t be happier with the result!

Craig and I spent many weekends playing around with the design and layout of the app.  We wanted it to be simple, straight forward, and user friendly.  The easier it is to use, the more likely people will be to use it.

We submitted Spense to the App Store for approval on August 27, 2012 and waited on pins and needles to see if it was approved.  Finally, on September 4^th, we got the email that said Spense was ready for sale in the App Store.  It was an unbelievable feeling!

I did loads of marketing the day that Spense was approved.  Within 48 hours we had been featured on 3 local TV news programs and within 2 weeks, Spense had been in 37 newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations around the country.  Our hard work had paid off!

Now that Spense is available on the App Store, that doesn’t mean our work is done.  I spend hours every day with social media, marketing, maintaining the website, and answering questions about Spense.  Craig works nights and weekends on updates to Spense, and we are planning to start work on an Android version within the next few months.

We have been incredibly blessed to have loyal support from our friends and families.  We couldn’t have been such a success without them!

Sync Expenses with Spense Plus

Just click on the link above and download Spense for iPhone from the App Store.  It’s free!  Want extra features?

Upgrade to Spense Plus!  It has all the Spense features you love, plus:

• Add a note and photo to any transaction
• Automatic backup using our secure cloud sync technology
• Email at the end of each cycle that includes graphs and your transaction history in a .csv file
• Access to your spending journal with multiple devices, including iPhones, iPods, and iPads
• Transactions are instantly synced with multiple users in a shared spending journal
• Access to all future added features, such as notes, ability to take photos of receipts and more

Track Your Spending and Save Money

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Spense is an easy, on the go way to track your daily expenses, straight from your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad:

• When you spend money, enter the amount and category
• Money spent is automatically deducted from your set spending target
• Instantly see your current balance
• Easy to read transaction history of your expenses and charts of your spending

Spense is built to be used while you are out running errands:

• Fast entry so you can enter purchases as you make them
• Make better spending decisions by always knowing your balance
• No need to carry around receipts or remember to input transactions at a later time