I am the creator of the Buckets of Money Budget, which I designed based on the system I designed to help people create and maintain a successful budget and get better with money.

You're here because you've heard you need a budget, and you're either budget curious or you have been trying to budget for a long time, but don't feel it's helping because…

You still feel like money is hard and frustrating, and that you don't have money for the things you want and need.

I know you're asking this question because tracking everything you spend in a month feels daunting and overwhelming.

Maybe you have been diligently tracking in a spreadsheet or other budget app, but money doesn't feel any easier or less stressful.

That was the experience Susie had. She had been using a popular budgeting tool for years because everyone said "you need a budget," but the app she was using didn't offer her any help setting up a good budget or helping her track things for the long term.

If you want to:

• Feel less stressed about money
• Feel more powerful
• Feel in control
• Have money for the things you want to and need to
• Not get detailed when an expense pops up
• Move forward financially
• Be better with money…maybe even proud someday in the future

Let's talk about tracking and how it guides and supports a good budget.

First, I'll answer your question directly about tracking every dollar in the Buckets of Money Budget.

Then we're going to go through all things tracking so you understand what's important to track, whether importing your transactions to categorize helps you or not.

Next, I'll tell you how the Buckets of Money makes tracking as simple as possible for those who use it.

Let's go….

Yes, Buckets of Money Budget helps you track every dollar.

However, YOU do not have to do all the tracking.

Buckets of Money Budget makes tracking easy.

Here's how:

Accounting for every dollar is an important part of creating and maintaining a successful budget, but it can feel daunting or overwhelming.

In the Buckets of Money Budget, you do not import your transactions automatically and then categorize them.

If you are using a budgeting system that imports ALL your transactions…

• It can feel like it takes FOREVER to click the button and select the correct category.
• Then, if the system automatically categorizes for you, you have to double-check that it categorizes it correctly.
• Even if the system has done it correctly, or you have categorized the same transaction the same way for months, one day you can open your budget tracking system and the automatic categorization fails.
• Then you have to spend time recategorizing.

While automation is supposed to help, I often found it annoying and time-consuming. In addition to the time it takes, there are two other reasons automated transaction imports can slow down budget progress:

1. Categorizing every transaction is not helpful or necessary when you have a budget you want to easily maintain.
2. When transactions are automatically imported, you have to categorize or check the automatic categorization. This means your budget, the amount of money you have available to spend, is often out of date. This makes it harder to know if you have money available to spend or not.
3. Also, studies on weight loss have shown that when people have to enter what they eat, they eat less because they don't want to track it. So, it's likely the same behavior applies to spending. The act of manually entering something could slow down the money you spend.

This is why the Buckets of Money Budget was designed differently, and using it will likely save you time tracking.

Buckets of Money Budget Uses Both Passive and Active Tracking

There are only a few things you need to track to maintain a successful budget so that you know exactly where you are with your money at any time.

When it comes to budgeting, there is a difference between what needs to be actively tracked and what needs to be tracked passively.

Things that need to be actively tracked are:

1. The things that you are spending money on throughout the month.
2. Things that you save for each month and spend occasionally.

You need to track these purchases to make sure you do not run out of money before the month.

Some examples of things that need to be actively tracked are:

Groceries Clothes Shopping Fun Vacation Car Maintenance

Things that need to be passively tracked are:

Expenses that have the same payment amount each time you pay them.

Some examples of things that can be passively tracked are:

Mortgage/rent Car insurance Streaming subscriptions Car payment

These payments need to be accounted for in your budget to ensure there is money to pay them and monitored for changes to the payment amount.

But you don't need to categorize your mortgage/rent transaction every month.

How long does tracking take inside the Buckets of Money Budget?

Tracking your budget can be done in about 30 minutes total per month, an average of 1 minute a day, because you're only tracking what needs to be actively tracked.

Less if you track as soon as you spend.

How does tracking work inside the Buckets of Money Budget?

For passive tracking:

1. When you set up your budget, anything that has the same payment each month, or at other intervals throughout the year, you put into a "consistent" bucket.
2. When something is marked consistent, the system deducts from your overall budget.

This way, you don't have to go through and categorize these payments each month.

If your mortgage or rent payment changes, or you get notice of an increase from a streaming service…

1. You simply edit the payment in Buckets of Money, and it adjusts your budget.
2. Then it shows you if you need to add or subtract from other buckets of money.
3. You adjust your budget accordingly.

Active tracking:

In the Buckets of Money Budget, variable and ongoing buckets are actively tracked.

Variable buckets are for a bucket of money that you will spend in multiple transactions throughout the month. Variable buckets are set up for things like groceries or fun.

Variable buckets need to be actively tracked to ensure you do not spend more money than you allocated for the bucket.

Examples of variable buckets:

• Groceries
• Gas
• Fun
• Shopping

How do variable buckets work?

1. You set the total amount you want/have to spend for the month in each bucket
2. Every time you spend money from that bucket, you enter (track) the transaction
3. The system deducts (or credits if it's a refund) the transaction
4. The total remaining updates to show you want you have left to spend in that bucket.

One of the tracking features in Buckets of Money is that you can add credits. So, if you buy something and then decide to return it, the money can easily be added back into the total amount available in that bucket.

(I never thought I'd do it, but once I returned salsa to Costco because it tasted so bad.)

It's as important to track the money you get back as it is to track the money you spend.

This feature makes it easy to track everything without the risk of missing something.

For example:

• If you go out to dinner with a friend, and you pay.
• You enter the transaction, and it deducts from your bucket total.
• Then, when your friend sends you the money for their portion, you add it back in as a credit.

This way, you know what you spent, and you can easily see that your friend paid you.

Tracking transactions in your variable buckets is one of the most important things to do if you want a successful budget.

You need to know what you have spent and what you have available at any time so that you can make the best financial choices in the moment you are making them.

There is a huge difference between "I think I have enough money in my budget to cover this" and "I know I have enough money."

If you have ever used your bank account to decide if you had enough money to buy something or not, and then you were short when a bill came out, you know that going off of what is in your account isn't a good budgeting method.

Once you get good at tracking everything, you might find that you have money left over at the end of the month.

Buckets of Money Budget makes it easy to track extra money, too.

1. The system will automatically roll over any extra money (or deduct money you overspent) from the previous month from variable buckets.
2. You can leave it in that bucket or choose to do something else with it.
3. If you choose to do something else, you simply create a transaction that deducts from the bucket.
4. If you're putting it into another bucket, like vacation, you can create a credit transaction for the bucket.
5. If you want to use the leftover money to make an extra debt payment, you can do that, too. Make a note of it in the transaction.

It makes it easy for you to track where you apply leftover money at the end of the month.

The other portion of your budget that needs to be actively tracked is referred to in the Buckets of Money Budget as ongoing buckets.

Ongoing buckets: Are for expenses or savings you set aside money for each month, but only spend it occasionally.

Examples of ongoing buckets:

• Car maintenance
• Vacation
• House maintenance
• Holiday gifts
• Birthdays
• Back to school stuff

How does actively tracking ongoing buckets work?

Here's an example based on car maintenance:

1. You set up an ongoing bucket for car maintenance.
2. You figure out how much you need each year for your vehicle maintenance.
3. When you enter the annual amount in the system, it will calculate a monthly amount to deduct from your monthly budget.
4. Then each month, it will add that amount into the ongoing bucket for car maintenance.
5. You leave this money sitting in your checking or savings account.
6. The total accumulates month after month.
7. When you need to pay for a car repair, you enter the transaction from the bucket.
8. The system subtracts it from the amount in the bucket.
9. The system then shows you what is remaining.

Here's a vacation example:

1. For vacation, you set up an ongoing bucket
2. Enter the annual amount you want to have available for vacations.
3. The system calculates the monthly amount to deduct from your budget.
4. Each month, the system adds the monthly amount to the vacation bucket.
5. You leave the money sitting in your checking or savings account.
6. You buy the flights a few months before the trip.
7. You enter the transaction in the bucket.
8. You see what you have remaining in your vacation bucket.
9. When you go on vacation, you add all the transactions for the money you spent.
10. The system shows you how much money you have left for your next vacation.

Tracking is crucial to a successful budget because when you track, you always know what money is available to spend, or not spend.

Only actively tracking your variable and ongoing buckets, keeps the time to track low, like 30 minutes or less a month.

How only actively tracking changed my budgeting experience.

In the past…

I had to keep a spreadsheet with endless formulas to get an up to date snap shot of what money we had available for what at any given moment.

And most of the time, it wasn't up-to-date information because…

• We had to set up a time to go through and track everything once a week
• We often missed the once-a-week mark…
• Sometimes two in a row
• When we missed tracking, we overspent because we thought we had more money available than we did.

Those tracking meetings with my partner were not fun for either of us. Trying to remember where we bought what. Going through Amazon to see how to categorize each charge. It was terrible.

Now…

• We can each enter transactions from our phone as soon as we spend money.
• We add simple notes to remind us what we spent in case the other person has questions.
• We both always know how much we have available in each bucket when we go to spend money.

Instead of trying to play "catch-up" with the tracking, we spend our finance time making plans for the future.

But if I don't actively track every transaction, do I have to worry about overdrafting my account?

The simple answer is you shouldn't.

If you don't spend more than what you have available in each bucket for the month, you should be good.

But you need to make sure…

• You have correctly set up your budget to account for everything you have to pay for in a month.
• You know how money flows in and out of your account.

Here are some things to help you out…

• After you set up your initial budget, it's a good idea to run through your checking account and or credit card statement for the last couple of months to make sure you accounted for everything that you have to pay for that comes out of your account automatically.
• If you are just starting a budget, limit where you pay for things to one source.
• If you get paid weekly or bi-weekly, make sure you have enough money in your account to cover the months before the "catch-up" month.
• Keep some of your savings in your checking account so that you don't have to worry about overdrafting. Even if you are only spending what you have available in each bucket, if you spend it all at the beginning of the month, there is a chance you could overdraft your account without a buffer. If you have savings as a buffer, and only spend what's in your buckets, you'll be good.

How Long Does Tracking Take When Using Buckets of Money Budget?

Less than 30 minutes a month!

When using Buckets of Money on my phone, I can enter a transaction in less than 30 seconds.

When I'm at Costco, and I enter multiple transactions, one from my food bucket and one from my miscellaneous bucket, I can be done before I get to the front of the line to have my receipt checked.

• Our family of 3 has no more than sixty transactions to enter a month.
• At thirty seconds per transaction, that is thirty minutes total for the month.
• And most months, we have 30 transactions or fewer.

Can you track every dollar if it's simple and doesn't take much time?

Of course you can.

But what if I get behind tracking?

You don't…

• Beat yourself up
• Decide you can't budget
• Give up

You do…

• Set aside a few minutes to catch up
• Make it fun…
  • Put on a rerun of your favorite show and see if you can "catch up" before the show is over.
  • Make yourself a special drink or treat when you're done.
  • Go do it at a coffee shop and enjoy your favorite beverage while catching up.

Next Steps

Are you ready to feel more powerful and in control of your money?

If you answered yes, it's time to sign up for the Buckets of Money Budget so that…

• You can track less and enjoy your money more
• Have up-to-date information about what money you have available to spend
• Feel confident when you buy groceries because you know how much money you have available
• Stop feeling guilty when you spend money on something fun, because you know there is money available in your fun bucket.
• Say no to spending when you don't have the money available
• Be better with money, and one day in the future…even feel proud of yourself and the way you manage money.

Let's do this!

If you're ready to stop tracking things that don't need to be tracked and get real information to make financial decisions– this is the system that'll take you further, faster.

In the Buckets of Money Budget, the system will guide you through setting up a budget based on your life.

It will guide you through a proven, step-by-step approach to creating a budget you can set up and maintain based on YOUR life.

You'll get the tools, structure, and support you need to:

• Set up a budget on your terms
• Make tracking simple, so you actually do it.
• See what money you have available to use
• Enter planned transactions to make sure you have money left for the good stuff
• Make it easier to stick to your budget with the weekly view option

And you don't have to figure it all out alone.

Every part of the Buckets of Money Budgeting tool is designed to help you get better with money — and feel confident doing it.

→ Click here to sign up. Use the coupon code BLOG for a discount!