Appreciation post: the $9 paper budget notebook I bought at a Walgreens in Naperville that caught my leak
Last Tuesday I sat down at my kitchen table with my coffee and started writing out October's bills, and that's when I saw it: I had put $40 for gas on there twice, once on the 3rd and again on the 19th. I sat there for a second and almost flipped the page, then I pulled out my old receipts and checked, and sure enough, it was one fill up I'd written down from two angles. That's when I thought about how some people swear apps are the only way to catch this stuff, and others say paper is dead. I kept the $40 in the budget since I really did spend it, but I moved it to my car repair jar instead of calling it gas money twice. So do you all catch doubles like that on paper or does your app flag it for you first? I want to know if I'm the only one still doing this the old way.
The part about writing the same fill up "from two angles" is what gets me. Do you log the receipt right when you get home, or does stuff sit in your wallet for a week and then you end up entering it twice because you forgot the first time? I ask because my pile of receipts is exactly where my doubles come from, not the notebook itself. And when you moved that $40 to the car repair jar, did you write a little note next to it so future you knows why it's there? I've had jars that slowly turned into mystery money because I never wrote anything down.