Tracking Your Spending

Since I am back to square one financially I have to start at step one in building my financial house. I say I am back to square one because I literaly am at square one. After several years in the work force, I now have a bigger mortgage than ever, and no equity due to the subprime mortgage mess and the fall of the housing market. I gambled heavily on real estate, and while I was making money for awhile, I lost pretty big. I try not to think about it, but to be tenacious and forge ahead with the determination to be job free. So....the first step is to rebuild my foundation, which has crumbled. I must pay off credit card debt and reduce spending. To that aim, I am trying an exercise taken from Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence . I am tracking every penny spent to see where all the money is going. I have an excel spreadsheet which does me just fine for the purpose. After four days I am shocked at how much money goes out, and on what. One area I know I need to cut back on is cell phones. I have the absolute worst plan out there, and with the teenagers text messaging with abandon, it is killing me. The problem is I am locked into a contract that does not run out until December of this year. And its 200 bucks per line to cancel the contract, so I guess I will have to wait that one out. In the meanwhile, I have added unlimited text messaging to one phone at the cost of 15 bucks a month, which should save me some money, because the extra fees for additional text minutes are exhorbitant. I am tracking the spending for thirty days, then I will evaluate where to cut back.