Ultimate Guide to Budgeting – Track Daily and Adjust Weekly

In this blog series about budgeting, we've looked at the importance of reviewing and planning, and now we're digging deeper into the importance of regular monitoring.

For any plan to be met, you need to review things regularly. This is the only way to ensure you stay on track. You’ve probably heard the analogy that if a plane sets of from New York on its way to LAX, it’s constantly course-correcting. If it didn’t it would end up in Seattle.

I’ve no idea if that’s true or not, but the point is you will need to track your progress throughout the month and adjust as necessary. There’s no point in setting your plan, if the next time you look at it is at the end of the month and you’re miles off.

The first part of that is tracking your spending. Now I know that this will put a lot of people off, but thankfully this is easier than ever. If your spending account is with one of the challenger banks such as Monzo or Starling, their banking apps will automatically suggest categories for everything you spend.

You can also tweak them, so every time a transaction goes out you can give it a category. And some even let you set budgets for the month and will do the tracking for you, alerting you as you approach pre-set spending limits.

You can set this up even if you’re with a more traditional because there are third-party apps such as MoneyDashboard or Yolt. Set a budget limit, link up your bank so the transactions go into the app and boom – the tracking is done for you. Or you can physically write it down each day and keep your own records.

At the end of the first week, take stock, which shouldn’t take long. If you’ve set aside £600 for groceries for a month, and you’re roughly a quarter of the way through the month, then you should have spent about £150 by the end of week one.

Be pragmatic though – if you usually do a big shop at the start of the month then you might actually by £225 into your budget, but your subsequent weekly shops will be smaller.

It may be the case that you will need to make an adjustment though. Tracking daily and adjusting weekly will give you the chance to head off any major over-budget spends before they have a big impact.

It might be that something unavoidable comes up, I dunno, like an unexpected trip you have to make and so your petrol budget is already shot early on in the month. In order to stick to a zero-based budget, something else will have to give.

This is the not-so-fun part. Maybe you’ll have to say no to your friends when they ask you to go out, that you can’t, because it’s not in the budget. Maybe you’ll have to skip this week’s Deliveroo and cook for yourself instead.

I don’t want to be too puritanical about this, but we’re here to learn control over our money. The joy of completing the month on budget is worth more than a night out which costs you a hangover and increase in your overdraft.

Track daily, adjust weekly. Stay alert. Stay focused. Be intentional.