The first benefit was that I started thinking twice about my numerous “small” purchases. At the end of two months of near-obsessive tracking, I made an Excel spreadsheet and plugged in every piece of data. Now I absolutely KNEW where my money was going, how long I should wait to make certain purchases, and how I could shift some of those numbers around to benefit me. No more bounced checks, debts paid off, started saving.

That seriously saved my hide. Living without the anxiety of financial ignorance made all that tracking SO worthwhile.

If her partner’s charging things that she doesn’t know about on their joint account then she should definitely ask, but not all couples are on the same page about keeping track of things and sometimes you just have to decide how important it is to know about all of your other half’s stuff.

But, in that case, I’d say it would be better if the stuff was getting charged on a separate account. Not that I think one partner should hide charges from the other (well, except maybe how much that birthday present cost!), just that it would be better to have each person’s stuff clearly separated so she doesn’t worry about charges on her account being bogus. I think both people should know what cards the other has and roughly what the balance is, even if they choose not to deal with their finances in the same way.

If that’s not the issue and it’s just that she can’t interpret the weird abbreviations on her statements, then it’s not patronizing at all to suggest that she ask the people who *write* the abbreviations what they mean.

If she’s spending money and forgetting it between the time she spends it and when she looks at her statements, checking her account regularly online is a great idea.

As for the cash thing (which she really didn’t mention as being a problem), I use cash as little as possible because cash is a giant black hole. I use my debit card instead and have detailed records of what I spent, when and where. And yes, I did have to learn to interpret a few things!

And yes, keep the receipts!!

Hopefully Kimberly can get her husband/partner on board with this. She didn’t say if the charges seemed little (like meals) but if they are, perhaps each person could have a cash allowance for at least a month or two, to try to limit the charges showing up, making it easier to track what IS going onto the card. Good luck!

It’s worth the effort, whatever system you come up with. And dealing with it weekly is best.

Also, someone got DH’s debit card information (most likely from an airport ATM in London) and made some charges that would have looked perfectly legitimate if they’d gotten our credit card rather than our rarely used debit card. They were reasonably small amounts for Amazon purchases we’d never made. (I do have to say that having fraudulent debit charges is a lot more of a hassle than fraudulent credit card charges– it’s been a week since we protested and they’re still going through paperwork while we don’t have access to that money in our account.)

Fortunately, the other commenters have weighed in with some much better advice for how to deal with charges you don’t recognize. I just want to add, for emphasis: This is not the time to bury your head in the sand or throw up your hands and say “it’s impossible.” If there’s any possibility that the charges could be fraudulent, you need to figure that out right away.

As for cash, we only take cash out once per month, on the 1st. $400 each. That becomes our spending cash for the rest of the month, and we don’t track it. Everything else goes through the debit card, and the receipts go into an envelope next to the computer. The next time I’m sitting at the computer with a few free minutes, I enter the receipts into our spreadsheet tracking our monthly budget.

However, we don’t do this at the end of the month, as Trent suggests. We do it continually, *throughout* the month. It’s the only way to know how much money we have left in each category. It lets us know when we’ve almost spent all of our grocery budget (or whatever), so we know to dial back the spending for the remainder of the month.

The phone number’s there on the statement, and you can easily call the company and find out what the mystery purchase was. It makes it a lot easier on everyone if you call the company directly.

You can also use Wesabe to manually enter in cash transactions, or you can try PearBudget, which my wife and I built, expressly for the purpose of tracking expenses and then using that info to help you build a budget. It’s like the “money diary” Trent mentioned, except it’s online.