I used a have a Fitbit. Looking it up, it was ten years ago, so I must have been a pioneer!! 😁 It was the Fitbit Charge HR, which unsurprisingly is no longer available as the straps kept on breaking on them. They are beneficial for a bit to see how many steps I’d walked (the 10,000 steps things is marketing. About 8,000 is a more accurate figure), measuring heart rate and seeing what gym classes were most effective.
But after a while its usefulness ran out. I knew if I exercised 3-4 times a week and what kind of exercise I did, I would see results. Having statistics on what I did months previously was useless, I never looked at them and they didn’t mean anything anyway. The Fitbit is good for is forming habits.
It is the same with tracking your spending. Tracking your expenditure is a laborious job. There is the An Post money manager which links to your bank accounts which can help you track where your money goes. But after a while, you will find that is loses it effectiveness. And if you are tracking your spending manually, you will definitely give up.
The benefit from tracking your money is that it should form good habits. You see how much you are spending on unnecessary items and where there are opportunities to cut back and put the money into savings instead. Tracking your spending for a few months, you can see if you live below your means, you aren’t going into your overdraft at the end of the month. That if you invest money on a monthly basis, you see your wealth grow over time. You see what works and what doesn’t work. It allows you to spend money in the knowledge that you can afford to do so.
Use money trackers to form the right habits about your money. Once you have formed those habits, spend your time doing more enjoyable things (which is literally anything else!).
Steven Barrett
24 February 2025