Budget Expenses

You don't need to meticulously track income and expenses (unless you want to). Instead:

1. Reduce the big three expenses: housing, transportation, food
2. Automate your investments and increase savings rate with each raise (to avoid lifestyle inflation)
3. Keep track of your net worth

In More Details

In general, saving a dollar is worth more than spending it and earning another dollar. A saved dollar can be invested pre-tax, it won't go through sales tax, and it will grow overtime when invested. While earning more is important, it's also vital to avoid extravagant spending.

Budgeting has many benefits:

• get an overview of your net worth across all of your accounts
• visualize how much you're spending and where it's going
• limit your spending in specific categories

It's also not all-or-nothing. Decide how much effort you want to spend budgeting. You could just setup Mint to get a financial overview. Combining a financial dashboard with reducing your largest recurring expenses (housing, transportation, food) is more than enough to reach financial independence.

Further Reading

Popular budgeting tools include:

• Mint — link accounts for automatic overview of finances
• Personal Capital — personal dashboard of your finances
• You Need a Budget — if you want to keep track of all expenses
• Lunch Money — simple and easy to use budgeting software

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