Not by counting pennies. Estimate, get a rough order of magnitude - things you can actually keep in your head and get an intuition for instead of math to maybe

Not by counting pennies. Estimate, get a rough order of magnitude - things you can actually keep in your head and get an intuition for instead of math to maybe forget in a checkbook somewhere if you record the calculation at all. Check your balances. Savings going up is good, savings going down is bad. If you need to get detailed, or your estimates don't line up with what your savings account is actually doing, you can also harness the power of online banking records do half the work for you. I semi-recently went over three quarters worth of transactions and aggregated them by category: "Food", "Home Expenses", "Car Expenses", "Food", "Health", "Shopping", "Subscriptions", "Charity", "Unknown". (Not well covered by this exercise alone but easy enough to add to account: taxes.) This already was overkill for me. I did nothing but fact check my gut (which was wrong on some details but right on all the macro points that actually mattered - rent, living expenses, and entertainment - exactly as you'd expect with estimates.) Monitoring total spending already tells me I'm where I need to be - with a good rainy day fund, a good savings fund growing at a good rate. Chicken? Don't know don't care. Food totaled bellow my estimates, which were already low enough I didn't feel them worth the opportunity cost of trying to optimize. That time would be better spent learning how to better negotiate raises and hiring, or learning new career skills. Unknown? Ditto. I happened to subdivide "Food" a little when initially categorizing out of ease and curiosity into "Groceries", "Caffeine", and "Eating Out". Could've saved $633.45 between 1/1/2017 and 8/16/2017 by not buying caffeine, didn't use a lick of manual arithmetic to figure that out. Computers did it for me, and it probably wasn't worth the electrons to even do that.