I love tweaking my budget and setting up spreadsheets of projections - how much money do I need if I retire at 65? How about at 45? How much house can I afford if I have a $10,000 downpayment? What if I save $20,000 for a downpayment? Sometimes I find myself wasting hours of the day coming up with a “better system” to track my cash flows.

I know some people save every receipt and enter each one into Quicken or Excel each week. Not something I do, but I could see how it could be addictive, while taking up quite a lot of time.

I use Mint to track my budget, which helps keep me on track. But I also have an excel spreadsheet to track my cash accounts and bills - so I know when I get my paycheck what bills need to come out of it, and how much can be transferred to the savings account, for example. Another spreadsheet tracks my net worth, broken down into various components. Another spreadsheet looks at what kind of return my different mutual funds are earning, and what percent of my money I have invested in each.

And you know what? All those Excel spreadsheets are my idea of a good time some days! My theory is that tracking expenses and income is fun for the same reason that playing video games is fun. Except instead of stats like “attack” and “strength,” I am tracking stats like net worth and percent increase in savings from prior month.

Do you find that you enjoy tracking your expenses in great detail? Or do you wish you could just ignore it all? I think a lot of us like the feeling of control that knowing what is happening in our bank accounts gives us.

Sovereign Bank sponsored a video competition where they gave filmmakers a debit card statement and challenged them to come up with a video that came up with a “story” for the transactions on the statement. (Winners got $8,000 and a free trip to Cannes 2011.) For those of us who make it a goal to check up on our bank statements, we might relate to the sentiment expressed by this man in the winning video. HE certainly will never be surprised by an overdrawn account (This post is sponsored by Santander):