Year Over Year Spending Analysis

I have a spread sheet with the total of every receipt on it. We manually enter at least once a month from credit card statements mostly. Cash transactions, of course, need to be managed at time of sale. This takes 15-20 minutes each month and let's us manually decide which category we want to put things into. We also separate out alcohol from our grocery receipts to track that as we discovered during Covid that it was easy to spend on alcohol without acknowledging it.

Writing it down at this individual receipt level has helped on accountability. It creates a mini point of reflection to see if that Amazon purchase you made a month ago was worth it. I think because we also know we're going to write it down, we make slightly different decisions when making purchases. Using a program that connects to your accounts and just pull in the data might be a time saver, but I think the value is from the reflection on where we are for the year of expenses. I can also flip to a different tab to compare last year's costs in that category (winter heating costs comes to mind...). I wouldn't be doing this if everything was being pulled automatically.

I'm using a program called Tiller to bring in daily imports across a bunch of accounts. It's not perfect -- it gets hung sometimes, but works for the most part. (It doesn't seem to work with Venmo.)

The only way for me to do this is to change my behavior. I'm building a life-long 100% habit. I write down every expense every time I exchange money. I capture it in a budgeting app.

The hard part is identifying all the surfaces where I spend money. I have recurring automatic expenses. I type these in at the beginning of the month or if I get an email receipt. I buy something from Amazon on my computer or phone. I have to capture it before I press buy because the amount goes away immediately. My barber takes cash, so I capture it when I hand him the cash. Tips are funny because you see the amount on the screen, but that's not what you really pay. So I have to remember and capture the amount after the tip, which is usually really small on the screen.

The apps don't matter. What matters is choosing to capture the expense every time there's an exchange. For me it's a 100% habit like wearing a seat belt when one is available.

If there are multiple people spending money, both folks need to consider whether this habit is valuable for them individually and together. It's not easy, but has been worth it for me.