Oh the clutter, the clutter, the clutter!!! Tracking expenses has helped me stop buying unnecessary stuff at the point of sale. I hate wasting money, but I hate clutter even more! Let me know if you end up tracking this way. I’m curious to see the results of someone else who tries this method.

It’s so easy to buy things you want but make no difference to you, especially when you’re paying with a credit card. Then they become clutter and you throw them away. I’m always looking for ways to make better decisions about money and spending. Timely post!

Thank you for your comment. Cool blog name, by the way! If you already have a system of record, it’s tough to incorporate emotions and motivations into it. That’s why I suggest doing this on a piece of old fashioned paper in the beginning. Unfortunately, spreadsheets and personal finance trackers don’t enable you to save this information in a way that’s easy to view and organize. We use GnuCash to track our expenses, but I also keep a separate spreadsheet for monitoring my emotions, and it’s a giant pain. Thankfully, once you do this for a month or two, you get a general idea about what makes you happy and what’s a total waste of money. Once you get a ‘feel’ for it, you can stop tracking it every month or simply track it every so often instead of every month. If you figure out a way to incorporate sentiments and emotions into your tracking, let me know. I’d love to figure out a better way to do it!

That said, your piece about intentional living resonated with me.
After I got serious about tracking my expenses, I realised that I had been mindlessly accepting the status quo of spending.
It made me pull back and reflect and realise that e.g. I valued getting lunch with coworkers — just not every day.
“What you measure, you can predict and influence,” and all that.