I guess a lot of you have been diligently cranking up your excel file to keep track of your daily expenses to have a picture of your daily cash flow. I would not surprise if 98% of peoples failed to continue on this habit after 3 months because it's simply too tedious and time consuming. At least I do not have a habit to keep receipts (I do keep receipts for buying books, parent medical for tax relief) or remember how much money I have spent on a simple lunch in local food stall where receipts are not always issued.

Having said so, does it mean that we should abandon this practice at all. The answer is no. You at least need to do it for some short period to understand your spending habits. Now it's vital you group your expenses into category such as foods,transportation, entertainment and etc. With this in mind, you do a calculation on net income minus expenses. If your figure is red, too bad you are overspending. So, what should you do next? Apparently, you need to reduce expenses on unnecessary items to get blue figure. After tweaking, finally you have a positive balance sheet. If you stop here, that is fine for short term at least you are not digging deeper into debt hole assume you include your credit card usage in your calculation and settle them promptly. If u are seriously thinking improve your financial status, you ought to do more than this. The magic word is "Save". You got to have a lot more cash before you can use it as tool to accumulate more wealth. How about set up a monthly saving target. I am asking you to deduct this target from your net salary and keep it a safe place such as a checking bank account. The final step would be you need to readjust your expense against this "new" salary. It's lot harder this time but you got to more prudent in spending your hard earned money.

So, you can throw away your monthly budgeting or daily expense tracking routine and start to appreciate your tool to manage your money.