My mum keeps the receipts.
I mean that in the 2026 sense – like most mothers, my mum seems to have a mental log of all my past transgressions, and she likes to remind me about them whenever she gets the chance…
Unlike most mothers, though, my mum literally keeps the receipts. I remember, as a kid, coming back from the shops with her and my dad. After we’d finished putting away the milk and bread and biscuits, she’d park herself at the kitchen table, supermarket receipts in hand, bury her nose in a notebook, and jot down precisely what we’d spent.
Back then, I thought this was the behaviour of an obsessive. Today, I find myself doing much the same thing – and realising she was on to something all along.
What gets measured gets managed. Just because that phrase is overused to the point of cliché these days doesn’t make it any less true.
Study after study has proven the merits of tracking. It's why people who weigh themselves regularly tend to stick to their diets. Or why the most well-travelled people we know are often those who have a map on their wall into which they stick a pin for each place they’ve been. And it’s why, as anyone who’s ever taken language lessons on Duolingo will know, being shouted at to “KEEP YOUR STREAK GOING!” can be surprisingly motivating. Even when the one doing the shouting is a big green owl.
Tracking has to be repeated to be successful. But repetition is only half the battle. You also need to break down the act of tracking into small, manageable tasks.
If you had the goal of becoming a better runner, doing a few jogs a week would probably be a better training strategy than just attempting an ultramarathon every third Sunday. Success isn’t found by trying to tackle everything in a single sitting, but one bite at a time. That is, after all, how you eat an elephant.
Now, let’s talk money. If you track your spending – like my mum, with her fistful of receipts – you know precisely what’s coming in and what’s going out. No other two pieces of data in your life are as powerful, because if you can work out how to spend less than you earn, financial peace of mind is sure to follow.
What to track? I recommend the following, as columns on a spreadsheet:
Incoming – salary, refunds, transfers, and so on
Expected spend – standing orders, Direct Debits, planned engagements i.e., “Maggie’s baby shower 2nd Feb”
Actual spend – when items from the expected spend column happen they get moved here, along with anything else that goes out of your bank account
Remainder – this is your incomings minus the combined total of both your expected and actual spend
To keep proper tabs on your spending, however, the key isn’t what you track but how. I update my spending tracker spreadsheet every single day. Hear me out.
It takes me never more than five minutes, at my desk before I log on to work, to add the small handful of transactions I made the day before to my spreadsheet. Then, with a full picture of my finances in front of me in black and white, I can go into tomorrow knowing what to say yes to and what to turn down. If I discover, for example, that I splurged more than planned on my last lads’ night out, I know the jacket I’ve been coveting will have to wait till payday.
Yes, you could just balance the books once a week, or once a month. But that would mean trawling through pages and pages of figures (my last bank statement shows 81 transactions) – and that’s if you even remember to do it in the first place. Tracking every morning takes minimal time, little effort, and zero brainpower – financial clarity on autopilot. And there we have it: the folly of lots-in-one-go, and the magic of little-and-often.
We get so much from our parents, both learned and inherited. Maybe your mother taught you some lessons that only became useful years later, or others you’ve yet to realise. My own mum’s kitchen-table ritual seemed strange to me when I first witnessed it all those decades ago, but today, I’m glad she kept the receipts.
The supermarket ones, at least.
Until next time,
Adam Kay
