Hello, whinnebbers. My name is Jesse Meekam, and this podcast number one twenty three for you need a budget where we teach you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck, get out of debt and save more money.

Today I bring you a small thought quick because my throat is hurting.

What you track you want to change. If you don't want to change something you may consider

not tracking it. I often talk about the

toothpaste example with what I call overzealous categorization. If you don't care or don't want to reduce how much toothpaste you consume, then you don't

need to worry about creating a groceries colon toothpaste category. If you don't want to change how much you're spending on shoes,

then you shouldn't have a category for it. If you don't want to change how much you're spending on

food and diapers and other household goods, maybe you could just lump it all together

into one big beefy category called Superstore. The point is what you track is what you are going to change. I've dealt with this

when looking at why now the business and thinking about our analytics. I'm struggling as we grow to determine exactly what we should track.

We can track anything.

We can really try and just look at any metric under the sun,

but do we want to change any of that and deciding what we want to

influence dictates what we track the same is true for your budget so where do you

think you're weak I would track that where do you think you're weak? I would track that. Where do you think you bleed money?

I would track that. And at first, you can track a lot, you know, throwing stuff against

a wall to see what sticks. And then over time you can get to that

nirvana that I've thought about a lot where you basically have I don't know four categories

you've got your giving, you have your fixed expenses, you have your discretionary

expenses and you have your savings And that would be your budget.

Four rules, four categories.

Maybe there's something to that.

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