Most personal finance advice starts with budgeting.
I think that’s backwards.
Besides investing, tracking expenses is the most impactful thing you can do for your finances - more impactful than budgeting. You can’t meaningfully budget if you don’t know what you’re already committed to.
The problem is that tracking everything is a lot of work. So this post focuses on the easiest place to start: fixed expenses.
Busy? Skip to the end for my free template.
Fixed vs. Flexible Expenses
I group expenses into two categories.
Fixed expenses are predictable commitments that show up whether you think about them or not:
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Rent or mortgage
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Subscriptions (streaming, insurance, gym)
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Recurring donations
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Utilities (even if the amount changes month to month)
Flexible expenses change based on daily choices:
- Shopping (like my 2026 personal shopping challenge)
- Travel
- Entertainment
- Emergency car repairs
- Food*
*Food is essential, but spending on food is highly flexible, so I treat food as a flexible expense. The exception is food subscriptions (like HelloFresh) which would be a fixed expense.
Why Start With Fixed Expenses?
Fixed expenses don’t require daily tracking, but they are probably a big chunk of your monthly spending.
Knowing your fixed expenses helps you:
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Understand what money is already "spent"
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See your real flexibility each month (what is leftover)
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Avoid surprises!
This awareness is the foundation for everything else. Everything I'll talk about in future posts.
My Fixed Expense Tracker
I built a simple subscriptions / fixed expense tracker in Google Sheets so I could see all my commitments in one place... all 30+ of them. 💸 Maybe my tracker can help you?
You can make a free copy here 👉 Free Template