I use quicken for income/expenses. Most of our investments are with Vanguard, so very easy to track on their site. I don’t sync all the accounts for net worth. We own a few single stocks that we just watch annually with no activity.
I categorize each expense from the cards, pay utilities and other things by check. I like to look at the year end statement, but otherwise don’t check monthly. I really don’t do a total net worth.
"He does something I find obnoxious - goes through the credit card statement every month and logs each purchase into a category, i.e., entertainment, travel, food, clothing, etc. so he can keep a running total by month/year. Always making a point to tell me how much was in the clothing category. Is there a program that we can use to dump the info from the bank so that it will categorize it? "
My everyday credit card is through Chase Visa. Just a few days ago, they emailed me such a statement for all of our credit card spending in 2015.
It comes pre-graphed so I see the spending graphed by month of the year and it breaks the spending into these categories:
Grocery Store / Drugstore
Automotive
Shopping
Travel & Entertainment
Home Improvement & Maintenance
Tax Deductible & Related Expenses
Restaurants
Other
Each of those categories is further subdivided.
For example:
Automotive is further broken down into Gas and Repairs.
Other is further broken down into Dry Cleaners, Health Clubs, Pet Supply, Salons and other miscellaneous.
The classification is not perfect, but I was doing some zero-based budgeting for our everyday budget for 2016 and it really helped me get a better sense of our spending. Frankly I was kind of shocked on how much I was spending on clothing – it was a lot more than I had thought and so I need to declare a moratorium on that.
The only downside is that I don’t think it’s exportable to any kind of Excel file. If it were, it would be even more awesome.
I manage the budget for a family member who is incapable of doing so and I do categorize every transaction accordingly. It’s tedious but sometimes it’s important.
“…goes through the credit card statement every month and logs each purchase into a category, i.e., entertainment, travel, food, clothing, etc. so he can keep a running total by month/year.”
Whenever possible, we use our Costco Amex card to pay for things, including home and car insurance, phone bill, etc. (I estimate that only a few purchases or payments are not through Amex). Amex does the category assignment automatically, color-codes lines by category, and even makes a nice color pie chart of the monthly spending patterns. 
I am torn… I love Amex a lot, but will have to switch to their new card provider in March.
We enter in every. single. receipt for everything and categorize every expenditure—never realized that might be obnoxious.
You want to see something financially frightening? Pull up a graph of household food costs over the years as each of your four children hits adolescence in rapid succession…
Ugh, that would take the joy out of spending.
I never keep track of how much we spend, though I look at year end statements of all of our credit cards and mentally tally them up. I never balance the checkbook,(my mother didn’t either) but I know we have enough money in the account.
As long as I know our expenses are lower than our income, we are fine. It helps that both my H and I are reasonable on our spending.
LOLz
Costco purchases encompass a ton of things–food, clothing, appliances, computers, gifts, books, yard tools and more. We spend a ton there and charge it on our CCard.
Some folks like to itemize. Some even file every receipt chronologically and alphabetically.
As long as the system (or lack thereof) works for those involved, great!
I got more joy out of realizing that I could achieve goal X if I just cut down spending on area Y!
@missypie – are any of those accounts at Fidelity? If so, they have a free retirement tool that lets you link your accounts wherever they are located and track things that way. It also gives you plenty of ways to run different retirement scenarios.
But…here’s my suggestion: this would be a great time to simplify and begin moving “stranded” assets into a single, low-cost brokerage like Fidelity or Vanguard or Schwab, or into your current 401(k) if that is allowed. You can’t move current 401(k) or similar accounts, but trying to manage assets when they’re in many different places is a PITA.
Either way, it all starts with making a list:
Name on Account, Brokerage/Bank, type of account, current balance
MIssyPie, Principal, 401K current, $342,964,
MissyPie, Dime Savings Bank, Savings, $18,324
MissyPie, ETrade, general investment, $82,404
MissyPie H, …
Wow! I would find this time consuming.
So does stores like Target…or even a trip to the grocery store can have more than groceries. This would make any automated report (like those form a credit card) helpful but not entirely accurate.
@arabrab That’s what we use. It’s good to have all the info in one place and being able to see overall trend.
“So does stores like Target…or even a trip to the grocery store can have more than groceries. This would make any automated report (like those form a credit card) helpful but not entirely accurate.”
They are all in the same category in my book - consumables. Why bother separating cleaning supplies from groceries? When we buy something major (over $100), then it makes sense to either swipe that card twice at the register and then re-categorize it in the account. Or if we buy $1000 TV and $70 worth of fruit at the same time, I just flag it as if we bought a TV. It all averages out in the end. Trends are more important than actual cents spent.
Haha–uh, document? I look at the mailings and online statements when they show up. Then I sort of remember what we have. 
I’m amazed to hear that people go through and categorize every receipt (and kind of impressed with that dedication). Your method seems a little more reasonable and less tedious, @BunsenBurner However, I’m with @cbreeze, who said
I would also add “and as long as I see our long term savings growing sufficiently”.
As one of these itemizers, it isn’t really all that time-consuming—you just have to be disciplined enough to sit down on a regular schedule (in our case, weekly) and enter them all in before (a) too many receipts pile up and (b) you forget what they were for. Takes less (usually much less) than an hour each week, and we know exactly where our money’s going.
Really, if you do categorize everything like we do, the biggest part of the work is at the outset, figuring out what your categories are going to be.
^^^This. We argue about the categories. H has “food” and “entertainment” - says some restaurant meals are entertainment, while others are just food…can’t explain to me the difference and is arbitrary (fancier is entertainment and cheaper on the go is food, but lots of overlap), where to me, it’s all food and I’m not being entertained! He even tracks what we spend on the cat. Honestly, it’s all a waste of time - it should all go into “household” expenses…we don’t vary much year to year. We have a big backlog right now and I’m thinking about not helping him anymore, hoping that he’ll stop the madness.
If we could somehow automate the process, I would put the time into setting up another system just to make him happy.
Travel, entertainment, eating out, tuition, books, household consumables and groceries, car repair, communications, insurance, home furnishings, utilities, clothing, medical treatment, emergency spending.
Lol! I need to start tracking what I spend on our cats!!! Just bought a second Lusmo and $40 worth of cat litter…
When we were 1st married decades back, we did try to categorize expenses but decided it was more trouble than it was worth to us. We were happier just “living below our means” and saving what we could. It worked well for us and made us less anxious about what category to put things in. Some folks LOVE budgets and categories and it works very well for them while others of us really dislike it and it just doesn’t work well for us. We’re all different–as long as we can save more than we spend and are very comfortable in retirement, it seems good enough for us.
I can see that for people who have no idea where their money disappears to or are having trouble paying down debt or living below their means, categorizing and keeping track of spending is crucial. For other folks, it’s a cost/benefit issue–does the value received outweight whatever hassle factor or burden of doing this?
“So does stores like Target…or even a trip to the grocery store can have more than groceries. This would make any automated report (like those form a credit card) helpful but not entirely accurate.”
Our day-to-day living came out of my paycheck and we pretty much banked what H made. Now that I’m retiring, we have agreed that H is going to have whatever part of his paycheck equaling my old paycheck transferred to our everyday account, so from a day-to-day perspective nothing will change. That’s great, but it did force me to think - I need to go back and get more disciplined about what we are spending on things. The Chase Visa roll-up really did help me see that one area, clothing, was out of whack with where I thought I was. It’s not critical that everything get categorized exactly perfectly in order to see that bigger picture; it doesn’t really matter if you bought a bottle of ibuprofen along with your groceries or anything. It’s the bigger picture.
I use Quicken and itemize all our various expenses. Every charge slip gets entered and goes into a chrono file along with all of that month’s bills (I chuck utility bills and credit card slips after a year unless it’s something major). I also reconcile all the credit card and bank accounts every month. And yes, I have a category for the dog. I don’t link Quicken to the mutual funds – I just update manually when we get the quarterly statements. If I am desperate to find out what’s in a given account, I check online, but my investment philosophy is dollar cost averaging and investing in mutual funds that allow me to sleep at night.
As far as home equity, I know what’s left on the mortgage. The local paper lists house sales and we get lots of ads from realtors, so I have a decent idea of what our house is worth (and how much work we’d have to do to sell it). DH gets a paper 401(k) statement annually; I don’t have online access to that. I don’t figure cars and personal property into net worth.
Because DH’s job requires an annual financial disclosure report, we do have to have all the statements to come up with gross numbers (including my IRA and 401(k). We have to disclose each asset’s value within a range of the asset (i.e., under $15k, 15,000-50k, etc.). The disclosure doesn’t ask for home equity/mortgage on a primary residence or value of vehicles.
I have been trying to get all the account information, life insurance policy numbers and such into a single document so that if anything were to happen, DH or my sons would know what is where and how to access it. I have a big filing cabinet with files for each, but I figured it would be good to have a master list. It may be a Luddite way of doing things, but it works for us.