Kate Campbell

So you can look at how much do you spend on groceries on average each month and figure it out that way.

Or you could do it old school and print out three months of your transactions.

And if you go into the online version, most banks will let you download an Excel version of your spending.

And you want to see that what you're spending each month, is that more or less than what your income is each month?

Because that will give you a good starting point to whether you have spare money to save and invest or whether you're potentially going backwards and using debt or your savings to live each month.

Yeah.

I mean, going forward, I probably wouldn't change it that much, maybe slightly less, but I probably won't change much of my spending on coffee with friends or coffee at work.

Yeah.

I'd rather cut my spending in other areas if I had to go through and look at everything, then cut spending on things like coffee and going out with friends.

They're easy to hate on.

Whereas if I go and look how much I've spent on books in the past 12 months, that's a lot more than I've spent on coffees.

They're just too good.

So sometimes you might go, I've spent a lot of money in this place, but I'm quite happy with that.

And sometimes you might just go, well, I'm going to increase my income and I'm going to work on negotiating a pay rise this year or getting a side hustle or renting out a spare room instead of focusing on trying to minimize my spending as much as possible.

Yeah.

And we go for a lot of what we've talked about today in more detail in our banking and budgeting RASC road trip course that we made with Tash.

So that's free.

You can get started with that this month.

And we have a heap of other free courses on RASC education if you haven't already signed up.

And there's a workbook that you can go for and do a spending and saving review as well.