One of the first steps I will take with you as a finances coach is to get an idea of your recent spending. If you buy everything on credit card and you bank online (like we do), then it’s reasonably straightforward. You can use a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets to keep your information organized. Most credit card sites allow you to download information in a .csv (comma separated value) file. You can open these directly in the spreadsheet program. You may have to fiddle a bit with it to clean up the data, or you can use it as is.

The numbers for the amounts that you’ve spent will show up in one column. You can use one of the first few rows to label your spending categories, such as groceries, restaurant, insurance, etc. Keep all of your amounts in that one column, and copy and paste each number to its appropriate category, trying to stay on the same line, if possible. Because I had so many categories, my sheet stretched past one screen going sideways, which made it a little difficult to keep amounts on the correct line.

Once you’ve categorized everything, total up the data. Find the total of the month’s spending (making sure you only include purchases, not payments), and find the total for each category. As a cross-check to make sure you’ve included everything in the categories, find the total of all of the categories. It should match your total for the month.

If you do that for three months, you’ll have a good idea of your recent spending. You should also be able to start identifying spending anomalies, purchases that only happen once in a long time, or may never happen again.

If you do a lot of transactions by cash rather than credit card, then you’ve got an extra bit of work ahead of you, and you may not be able to track your three-month historical spending unless you’ve kept all of your receipts. If you don’t keep receipts, you may have to start — and look forward to organizing your spending over the next three months. But that’s something I can help you out with, too.