do you keep track of you rincome and expenses?

Yes, of course I did my account keeping to keep tracking my family "cashflow" account. My husband will check and supervise that account every week. From this simple book keeping, I erudite a lot from my husband about, General Ledger, Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet, as well. Actually, I'm not from account background, but my husband taught me very serious when it comes to family account. I enjoy learning it. Once loved doing it, no longer a lazy job to do it ....... I enjoy doing it, at least I can know the right "deficit" figure to my family monthly account.

I use a spreadsheet to keep track of income and expenditure. There are several very good free budget templates for Excel which you can download, though it's not too difficult to create your own. If you don't have Microsoft Office, you maybe have MS Works, which has a spreadsheet (though it's not as powerful as Excel). Works also has a Home Budget template (under Financial Worksheets) into which you can enter income and your expected and actual expenditure under convenient headings. If you are not familiar with spreadsheets, it is worth learning a little about them because they take the headache out of all the calculations. Once set up, a spreadsheet will automatically add a column of figures, subtract expenditure from income to show your balance or what money you should have at the end of the month, calculate your tax liability and much, much more. I also use spreadsheets for making to do lists, cataloguing books and CDs, keeping track of my MyLot earnings, recording my Peak Flow Readings (for asthma control), listing my eBay auctions and calculating shipping costs for the items and many other things.

I know what you mean when you said it is tiring. It is even more depressing when you know that your expenses are greater than your income. Once a month I compute my net worth. I'm no expert in accounting, but I'm happy enough with simple calculations; that is, total assets minus liabilities. Naturally, income and expenses come into play. I just want to have a general idea of where I stand financially, how I'm doing with my investments, what can I afford, etc etc.

I use Microsoft Excel and I jot down all my available money and expenses like what you would see in a passbook bank account. Like there's a date column, a deposit column, a withdrawal column, then a comment column so I can remember like if I paid a huge amount of money, I know who I paid it too. Same goes to my checking account. I know the bank issues statements, but I do the same thing like above but there's an extra column for check number so that I can monitor it. I also keep a calendar (the one with boxes), and I put due dates and sometimes if I don't have time to put in numbers in my computer, I write it down there, so I could refer to it when I have time.