It's highly dependent on your personal situation.

If you have plenty of income, tracking grocery expenses might be a waste of time, like tracking how much air you breathe.

If your income is barely meeting your expenses (or worse), the grocery budget is one of the few places you can make meaningful decisions that will lower your costs.

And there's a tricky middle ground where it feels like you have enough income, but if you don't pay attention, you'll die by a thousand cuts to small expenses that feel insignificant by themselves.

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distances 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, very true. It might be useful to start with overtracking to see where the money actually goes.

I didn't track anything until about 5 years ago as my mental model was "track all purchases", and I wasn't willing to do that. Someone had to point out that higher level tracking can be quite useful too, and this is what I found to work well for me. That's why I bring this up in related topics: it's not an all-or-nothing choice.

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astura 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't track purchases at all, I track savings. I find that much more sustainable. I have a savings rate goal (50%), and automatic withdrawals to make that goal. If I can't pay my bills without dipping into the savings then I'll have to reevaluate my spending only then. As long as my savings rate is what it needs to be I don't worry about spending money.

	▲	distances 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This sounds like a good way to do it. I'm a freelancer with variable income so I can't do a fixed investment rate. For me it's useful to see what was the actual rate vs. what I'd like it to be, and the high level view is quite enough to track that.

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elric 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I used to track every single payment, thinking I was doing excellent budgeting. But in reality it was mostly bikeshedding. The current approach works well for me, but I can totally see a use for tracking more in some cases. If I were a smoker or a heavy drinker I'd probably track those, for instance.