25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive about $100/month at best. Tracking it allowed us to not go negative.

As soon as we got real jobs with a real income, we didn't waste time with that. Our philosophy now is to just make sure that we spend well under our means and not track. We don't penny-pinch, but we still keep some of the grad school "do I really need this?" mentality.

Our normal spending is somewhere under 1/2 of our take-home (including mortgage), so we just don't worry about it and keep saving. It helps that we don't have fancy tastes. It's a nice stress free way of saving and we don't have to get neurotic about tracking every penny either.

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ghaff 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It probably worth at some level not totally losing track of various subscriptions or routine daily purchases. Won’t buy you a house but can be a few thousand a year.

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michaelrpeskin 7 hours ago | parent [-]

One of the things that the tracking taught me was to be allergic to subscriptions. I only have a few where significantly more convenient because I know I'll use it. Outside of our phones (and the kids don't get phones), we have one music service for the family, I'll allow two video streaming services and if the kids want to add one, they have to pick one to cancel, and I have a coffee subscription because the owner lives down the street from me and it's fresher than I'd get in the grocery store.

It's a good point about the routine daily purchases, I never thought of that. But I live semi-rural so I'm not out every day wandering around the city and picking up a snack or anything like that. I imagine that could add up.

	▲	ghaff 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s about where I am along with a couple bundles plus a few computer related subscripts like Backblaze, VPN, and Adobe related. To the other point, a lot of people have a more or less daily Starbucks or other breakfast related habit.