TL;DR: Spending tracker to better visualize how our money is changing and where its going. Link
A month or so ago, I made a long detailed post about paying off my car and the actual Total Cost of Operation (TCO) for my vehicle over the last 5 years. Here's a link
Since I had learned some things making that Excel Pivot Table and graph and kind of enjoyed the process, I began tracking all of the spending that my wife and I did and put it into a similar spreadsheet. I am aware that this is exactly what Mint and YNAB are for, but I liked the exercise of creating the whole thing and manually putting in the transactions every day make each little dollar spent feel more real.
NOTE This is not a budgeting tool right now; it is simply a way for me to track/forecast spending over time and see where we are getting hit the most (credit card interest) and work to get better and pay things off. Here they are
BACKGROUND My wife and I have been married for a year, but before that we lived together in a somewhat high COL place for 2 years. We really enjoyed all of the restaurants and bars around us and living outside of our means. Now we have to credit card debt to show it (~$28k). In July of last year, we decided to move to a lower COL area and look for new jobs. I got at $25k salary increase (beer sales > engineering) but my wife took an $8k decrease (HS teacher). We wanted to buy a house and found that a decent starter home in the new town would be $500 less per month than our studio apartment. We did an FHA loan and only put 5% down because we needed to make it happen soon. Not the smartest idea, but I think it will work out for us.
In September of last year, I started tracking all of our joint spending and credit cards. I have set budgets for us that have shown mixed success. I am a numbers person (obviously) and my wife could care less. Talking about money more often has made it a little less scary. For me, seeing the numbers change over time has helped stick to the goals.
Our main faults are like those of many others:
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eating out too often and not cooking at home
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eating fast food for lunch instead of bringing food
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trying to keep up with "The Joneses"
Since January 1 this year, we have made a conscious effort to eat at home much more and take leftovers for lunch. The weekends were a big drain for us where we would almost never eat at home from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Working on this has helped, but everything in moderation, including moderation
GRAPHS Everything is tied to the transaction data that I input daily (or every other day if we have a zero spend day) and comes back to my "Dashboard".
Things on the Dashboard
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Daily balances for each account
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Balances for checking/savings the day before the next paycheck including all auto drafts
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Amount paid in CC interest YTD
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CC utilization
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A few specific spending categories and locations that I want to track
Feel free to pick apart my charts and let me know what you think. I am well aware of how our bad spending/saving habits in the past will affect us over the long run, but this is my tool to track our progress and work towards a better financial situation. We have made many of the mistakes that I see others make on here (student loans, car payments, credit card debt, paying PMI, etc) so it's amazing to think how much money we will have each month after we pay off the debts.
Positive steps made so far (and you can see them on the graphs)
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Slowly breaking the cycle of living paycheck-to-paycheck on almost $100k
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Have at least $1000 in savings and don't touch it
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Starting to snowball the credit card debt
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Eating at home/bringing lunch has help to lose a little weight
Submitted February 20, 2018 at 02:50PM by points4trying http://ift.tt/2GxtajR
