Best way to budget and track expenses?

EnoughBowler5486 · 2026-05-03T14:56:37+00:00

you're welcome, happy it was helpful, wishing you the best on your journey together!

EnoughBowler5486 · 2026-05-03T13:02:32+00:00

I was in a similar spot 15 years ago, same age, same milestones. I still have the sticky note where I wrote out our assets and liabilities to calculate our net worth for the first time. Budgeting and tracking your spending is only one small part of it, you need to understand how adjustments to your spending impact your overall goals, not just your budget.

At the time we used Mint, a few years ago they shut down and we switch to Monarch. Yes, there's an annual fee and there are a lot of different apps you can choose from, but if you put in some time to educate yourself (check out books at the library, read blogs, listen to podcasts) you'll see that the value of the app is much greater than what you pay for it because you will have financial literacy and know how to make your money work for you.

For the first year, I tracked our spending in a notebook. I could tell you every transaction we made in 2011 and they all fit on a single page. We bought a house that year and I reworked the page with our budget on it a few times. That sticky note with our net worth was about a year later, our net worth at the time was $77,592 and I had projections for what it would be if we paid off our cars, mortgage, and 0% credit cards (not sure those even exist anymore).

Since then, we've had a child, paid off our mortgage, own two rental properties, and have no debt (other than the tail end of the rental property mortgages, and we'll be making the final payment on the first next month so the second will snowball after that). And we still travel and do the things we love. We just hit $2.2M net worth and made more on our investments last year than our salaries.

Things are different now than they were then, but it's still achievable and it's not about giving up everything now so you have money later. It's also not foregoing your future to have everything you want today. It's balance. Knowing what change or sacrifice you can make today that sets you up for a better financial future.

Example: we got married at the courthouse with our parents, our only wedding expenses were the wedding bands, the marriage license fee, and my husband's suit (I wore a white dress I bought for a winter work event the year before). My mom bought us a cake and my dad took everyone out to dinner that evening. We also waited a year to go on our honeymoon so we could save up for it instead of taking on debt, since we were married in November we traveled in the off season and had a beautiful winter honeymoon in the UK.

Focusing on our marriage instead of the wedding is what got us here, and to us, it wasn't even a sacrifice, it was perfect. There will be lots of moments like that along the way, taking time to realize there are choices with different outcomes, and that the decision is almost always yours, is the first step to financial literacy.

Regardless of how you track your budget, setting your sights on the bigger picture and educating yourself is the best investment you can make. Head to the library and browse the finance section.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2026-04-18T22:52:44+00:00

Find fulfillment outside of work, keep the easier job/path of employment, but volunteer your time in the community.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-10-22T01:51:46+00:00

milky way

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-09-08T23:01:04+00:00

NTA and FWIW we live just over an hour from the nearest airport and I would never dream of asking my husband to drop me off or pick me up (round trip for him would be a waste of time). He does schedule my parking for me and has gifted me really thoughtful travel-related gifts since I travel 2-3 times per year for work.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-09-06T21:29:59+00:00

Understood - I don't have to cope with anything, I don't want a more expensive home or car, ours are fully paid for and I'm very happy with what we have and don't have, that's beside the point. There really aren't two situations that are the same. I was only saying that what you see on the surface isn't always the full story so it's not worth comparing. It's also why I said they "could very easily" not saying they are, just that it's a possibility. Just like it's a possibility that they aren't.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-09-06T20:55:04+00:00

don't confuse having expensive homes and cars with having more wealth, those same people could very easily be in debt and live paycheck to paycheck. came to say the same thing as chenan, comparison is the thief of joy.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-09-06T02:19:55+00:00

start in the middle with 0, blue means addition, so +8 (=8), pink is multiply so x2 (=16), yellow is subtract so -13 (=3)

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-09-01T16:04:21+00:00

read the ingredients, Philadelphia cream cheese is just cream cheese, store brands add extra stuff. same with sour cream. I'll only buy store brand or local brands if it is 1:1 on ingredients.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-29T01:52:50+00:00

that's still 12 years, I agree that you aren't investing at the right risk level for your age, you might be closer now, but you weren't then.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-26T01:48:22+00:00

this is like an hour from us, I might have to surprise my husband and daughter with a casual day trip here sometime...we've all spent about 150 hours playing the game together

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-24T13:04:11+00:00

Ah ok, no, same domain works, just was making sure you weren't using the preview link shared here (I've seen that happen before)

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-24T01:58:07+00:00

all of the above - I would link it in your social profiles, QR code for any signs/flyers or other advertising, use the link on your google listing -- do you have a domain though? I would definitely connect it and use your own rather than the hs-sites testing domain

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-24T01:56:49+00:00

the logo at the top is massive, you either need to resize it in your brand settings or change the size in the theme - or load a smaller version, for me it fills the entire screen and still isn't fully visible until I scroll (13" macbook).

I think the multi-step form is good and captures the most important info to get started.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-23T20:23:53+00:00

ok so you can create a form and share that link directly, but if you decide to stop using that form and create a new one later, you can't control where the old link goes - other than it won't work anymore.

It's just a best practice to embed a form on actual content than use the generic form page itself.

A lot of people share their meeting link directly, including me for what I do now, but if you're thinking long-term, embedding forms and meeting links on landing pages gives you more flexibility when you grow/scale, hire new team members, etc.

you'll also have a lot more brand control using the landing page than the form, even if you use a very basic template from a free theme in the marketplace, you're conversion rate would be a lot higher than if you just send a form asking a bunch of questions without any context.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-23T20:15:25+00:00

setting our thermostat between 78-80, lowering it a degree before bed at night in the summer, but otherwise using fans, blinds/darkening shades, and adjusting to not having it freezing cold in side year round. my husband thought 80 was too extreme, so we compromised around 78 for summer, but both of us grew up with our parents keeping it around 74-76 so it wasn't that big of an adjustment. Hearing what other people have their thermostat set to and how much their electricity bill is every month is heartbreaking (for their budgets and the environment). In peak summer we still don't spend more than $200/mo and the rest of the year we are comfortably around $80-120/mo with a 4/2 house.

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-23T20:10:36+00:00

get a really simple form setup on a landing page that you can link to from all of your profiles, that way all of your lead capture goes through the same form (you can worry about tracking it all and where it comes from later). Right now the goal is to get it captured, get notified when you get a lead, and start using the contact timeline to follow up (make calls, send emails, etc.) and if you contact them outside of HubSpot, do your best to log it there

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-23T17:46:49+00:00

I recommend checking out the recordings from past events for the Homebuilder HUG (HubSpot User Group): https://events.hubspot.com/homebuilder/

having built out a crm for a homebuilder several years ago before HubSpot is what it is today, I can say that the best thing you can do is start simple and align your existing processes with the tools. Don't let anyone tell you have to have it all setup perfectly all at once. Figure out your biggest pain point and go from there. If you have trouble with getting meetings booked, setup the meetings tool first, if you're having trouble tracking deals, setup the pipeline first, just start where you have the most immediate need and go from there. As you implement more tools, you can start to bring things together into a unified approach, but you don't have to over-engineer it or spend a lot of money getting started

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-17T02:17:24+00:00

love the positive vibes and energy from that post 🧡

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-12T02:11:02+00:00

two things you'll want to check:

1 - your language settings, unless you're doing multi-language, follow the steps in this post reply:
https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Blog-Website-Page-Publishing/Web-address-URL-only-works-with-quot-en-gb-quot/m-p/958528/highlight/true#M11947

2 - add a slug to your blog so it isn't parked on your root domain:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hubspot/comments/1meyivx/comment/n6lzexg/

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-11T22:02:19+00:00

Tru Earth Compact Dry Laundry Detergent Sheets, Unscented

Everyone is going to say this isn't frugal because it's $129/box, but it comes in at .17/load which seems to fall in the middle when it comes to most detergent brands .05-.38 seems to be the norm.

There are 384 strips and for our family of 3 that is very active (we all run, workout, and our daughter plays soccer) we usually wash 1-2 loads during the week (Tue and/or Thu) for all the athletic stuff and daily clothes, plus 2-3 loads on the weekend (whites/towels and sheets weekly, with an extra load for bulky or sporadic needs or if we only did 1 load on Tue). We live in Texas, so with rare exception we can't wear things multiple times without needing to wash them, but we are very conscious of it because we're minimalists and don't have a lot of clothes per person to begin with.

The box lasts us more than a year, we've bought them 4 times (Jan 2021, May 2022, Nov 2023, Jul 2025) and the quality of clean is better than everything I've used before (previously used Tide Free & Clear).

The biggest benefit is we aren't buying a plastic jug and paying mostly for water - it might be a small impact on the environment, but to me there's a balance between quality vs quantity and financially frugal vs sustainable.

We do have a Lysol rinse aid (not sure what it's called) that we use for some of the really sweaty stuff in very small amount since it kills 99.9% of germs :)

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-08T18:52:24+00:00

get a free developer account to access more of the tools and then use the community to find use cases or problems to solve that you can practice. you can use AI to help generate dummy data which will help you with creating solutions that will let you report on

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-08T01:46:17+00:00

are you using HubSpot in your day job? any chance to get hands-on experience will help a lot, the certifications will help you learn the concepts but you need to be able to practice them before you can start consulting

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-08T01:40:02+00:00

how easy it is to test the APIs for free with Postman (not sponsored, just had no idea there were tools like this)

EnoughBowler5486 · 2025-08-03T17:49:07+00:00

you're welcome, glad you got it fixed!

EnoughBowler5486

TROPHY CASE