The first of my money pages has to do with budgeting and spending. In 2025, I tracked every dollar that I spent and it gave me a great amount of data. Everything was added to a spreadsheet and I created categories so I could figure out how much was spent on groceries vs. household, furniture vs. hotel travel, and pets vs. vehicle costs.

I start with pages for my general monthly budget, which is my regular expenses, and irregular expenses which I know are going to crop up such as insurance premiums, property taxes and annual things like Dropbox and Canva.

In addition to creating some savings goals, I have spending goals for each month and category so that I don’t get to October next year and be surprised by how much I’ve spent in each area.

Setting the monthly goals and annual goals is great, but if I don’t track my spending then it’s useless. Each month has a spread like this:

On the bottom of the right page is a place to track my no spending days, each month I aim to have 15-18 days where I don’t spend any money.

If I do have that many no spend days, there is always enough room in the rest of the spread to write out my expenses–even when I am traveling and spending frequently.

New this year is creating a quarterly recap every 3 months so I can check in 4 times a year to see how closely I’m following those spending goals. Again, this is an effort to continually correct spending habits instead of waiting 12 months to see if I succeeded.

Here’s a 2025 monthly spending page: