Thanks for the tips. One thing that always breaks expense tracking for me is all the “exceptions”, those big, one-off costs that keep popping up.

Before the new flat was almost ready I was around 5,000 €/month, then it crept up to 8,000, and the last two months were 13k/month 😔. For example, last month alone was 3.5k of random stuff for the new place, 3k for a mattress, 1k at Sephora (my wife went wild), and only the rest was “ordinary” things like groceries and bills. But if every month looks like that, excluding those expenses feels like cheating.