I used to use GnuCash to track everything, all credit card purchases, mortgage principle and interest...literally everything about my finances. But now I have

I used to use GnuCash to track everything, all credit card purchases, mortgage principle and interest...literally everything about my finances. But now I have reduced my footprint to the point where I spend substantially less than I make, so tracking everything like I used to do seems pointless. Using something like mint.com can be a way to get something almost as good as GnuCash with much less effort. But I never felt comfortable giving them all my online banking passwords, so I stayed away from that. As far as spending goes, I buy just about everything with my Citi Double Cash credit card which pays 2% cash back on all purchases. I have an automatic transfer that pays the balance in full every month, so I never have to worry about late fees or interest payments. Any other bills, deposits, etc that can't be put on the card are set up as automatic deposits/withdrawals, so managing everything takes essentially zero effort. Almost all of this stuff happens via my CapitalOne 360 (formerly ING Direct) high interest savings account. They give me instant transfers between that and my 360 checking account as well as have a feature where overdraft on the checking account gets handled with no fees from the savings account. This means that I am able to keep the vast majority of my cash on hand in a savings account, so I maximize the returns of that money too. Since my spending habits are now naturally restrained and I'm not concerned about tracking where my money goes what I do now is my own simplified take on a cash flow report. Every month I record in a spreadsheet the balances of all my cash accounts (two checking and one savings account). I also record the sum total of any deposits I make to investment accounts. I don't record the actual value of the investment account because then there would be lots of fluctuation due to the market. All this takes me like 5-10 minutes every month. From these four numbers I can derive a very accurate picture of exactly how much money I am saving every month, and when I subtract this from my actual after-tax paycheck amounts, I know exactly how much I'm spending. The information I get from this report tells me the only number that really matters for early retirement: your savings rate, as a percentage of your take-home pay. From this you can get a really good idea of how long it will be before you can retire (https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement).