How to give yourself a heart attack by looking at where your money goes
I’ve been toying with the idea of a spending fast after reading a book called The Spender’s Guide To Debt Free Living. Debt isn’t really an issue for me, but I’m definitely a spender, and if anything happened to my income my savings would be cactus in a few months. I’m one of those people who feels compelled to spend anything leftover after I’ve paid all my expenses and put money away in various other saving/Christmas club/emergency accounts and whatnot. I’m also one of those people who will convince myself that I desperately need to have some random thing I didn’t know existed 24 hours earlier.
So with that in mind, I have been keeping track of everything I spend from Jan 1 to now. I didn’t make any changes to my spending patterns; I just wanted to keep track of my normal day to day spending. Then I added up the various categories (groceries and food, alcohol, books, gifts, etc). The one that shocked me the most was the groceries and food category. It was too hard to separate this into actual groceries, lunches, coffees and so on so I bundled it all together, along with food delivery like Uber Eats, and small purchases like snacks from vending machines etc.
In January my total expenditure in this area was $1215.31, and in February it was $863.92.
On the plus side, this has really spurred me to plan and start a hardcore spending fast from March 1.
On the minus side, WHAT THE FUCK. I don’t eat any more than the average person but I do have a tendency to pop in and out of supermarkets and go to the farmers market and buy a bunch of stuff that just looks nice. Even so, that seems like a crazy amount of money for a household with one full time adult and one adult who comes over for a free feed several times a week.
Are you a spender or a saver? Have you ever tracked what you spend? Were you surprised by the results?
Comments
I end up looking at and categorizing my expenses a couple of times a year and am always surprised how much I should have leftover after rent, bills, etc. The rest of my expense basically falls into the categories of food, booze, entertainment, and shit I probably don't need but feels good to buy (a lot of G.A.S.). Outside of entertainment which I think is a completely reasonable expense to keep me happy (like concerts, movies, nights out with friends, etc.), there is a lot of waste.
Food is one I have a hard time with. I really like to cook, but I've taken on a new role at my job where I work a lot longer and am more stressed than I've been used too. I just don't have time to cook, and I waste a lot on groceries spoiling cause I don't have the time or emotional energy to spend an hour cooking after a long day. Without more discipline, take-out/deliver/eating out might end up being cheaper than spending hundreds at the grocery store that more or may not get used. Though even if that's true it's a lot harder to eat healthy that way.
How are you going about tracking things? I feel I'm good at looking at the data and recognizing the problems. Getting an ongoing trend and executing on it is where I lose patience/willpower.
At the end of the day, I'm ok financially but I've never tracked my spending...and I think the main reason why is because I'd be embarrassed to see how much money I waste.
alcohol is expensive I’m Singapore and it tends to make me a very pleasant person who then buys too much shit on amazon for the kids or build out my book library
Red is the grocery store food and work lunches (eaten out). Yellow is other dining -- probably the odd evening meal eaten out and weekends.
The 2nd half of the year I started shopping at Whole Foods and it's interesting to see it did fatten up a bit.
You might have been the person that turned me on to this. If so, thanks. I worry about money 5% as much as I used to, and I was able to build up a 6-ish month emergency fund in 1 year.
Yeah, I never fill in future months. It's too much busywork. I just throw money into the emergency fund, and I have other savings envelopes too (a car, a mattress, a cell phone, etc).
Eating healthy is even more expensive.
To top it off you should take my 70+ mother shopping. She is angry stuff isn't the same price as the 70's and claims every store is trying to RIP her off.
It's about $4 for a loaf of bread. I pay about $6 for my Whole Foods loaf of bread, lol. Milk is about $3-4 a gallon. I have no idea what an avocado is, because I'm allergic (I know, tragic).
I also live in a costlier part of the country. Not Atlanta, but the suburb I'm in. It's not like living in Seattle or NYC, but it's higher than average.
I'd say most of the expenses is the work lunches. Here's the graph with just grocery store (red) and dining out (yellow).
I think you can get those prices at Walmart here. I never know what store supposed you're supposed to cite with this.
!????!!!! Bob Loblaw's Lah......... ah, I can't do it. But it was exciting.
Yeah, then you're much less expensive.