1 year of tracking my personal finances!

[Datastache]

As of two days ago, I'm celebrating one year of tracking my net worth (etc.) in Excel. (Tried Mint, but I prefer the ultimate control of using a spreadsheet.) Not sure if I started before or after discovering MMM, and I was already pretty frugal anyway, but this has definitely been illuminating. The actual numbers aren't very impressive, since I'm pretty young, my income is low, and I live in an area with high cost of living...but my 'stache is definitely growing, even if it's not growing that quickly.

[RWD]

Congrats and keep it up! I started tracking my expenses (in GnuCash) when I got married. But then we bought a house and I got a little behind on entering transactions. Eventually I stopped entirely and started accumulating receipts with the intention of backfilling. I realized a few years ago that I was never going to go through the bags of receipts and just started fresh again in January of 2012. I really wish I had longer records now, but you have to just keep at it.

[schimt]

Haha i like how the username goes with your post.

I use mint to log all my transactions and export the data to excel when i want to do some better analysis. I find it easier this way, since a most of the transaction logging is automated other then some up keep. then like you said, it is nice to do a lot of analysis with excel and pivot tables when setting budgets ect.

But what ever works for you, is miles ahead of what most people do. Congrats on the progress

[Lizzy B.]

Congrats on your dataversary!  We've been tracking our expenses (we use Quicken) for several years now. Since we only recently started "tightening the belt", it's really interesting to compare our spending now to past spending. Keep at it! Your future self will thank you!

[Bob W]

Good for you!


Be sure to keep those records and detailed cost of items for 40 or 50 years.   You will be amazed at how things change over time.

The cheapest gas I personally remember (age 55) is 19 cents a gallon!   I jumped for joy yesterday when filling up and it was down to $2.65 in Missouri with walmart card discount.    Could gas really go to $35 per gallon in the next 40 years?

A friend of mine's father bought lots of tree land in Missouri at 50 cents and acre in the 1920s.   It is selling for around $600 now!

Gotta love the drip drip power of inflation!