Tracked Almost Every Purchase Back to January 2017

[dbfire]

Whew!

I started tracking every purchase in an Excel sheet starting in November, 2018. This was a year after I quit my full-time corporate job and went freelance (marketing). I lived in Brooklyn, NY at the time and worked in Manhattan, and I knew that my spending on food delivery and Amazon purchases in 2017 was CRAZY. I remembered a month where I spent over $1k on Seamless. I spent $3k on vinyl in 2017. I decluttered and went hard into minimalism (51 trips to USPS selling vinyl in 2018) and anti-consumerism in January, 2018 and part of me was curious what my previous spending habits pre-tracking looked like.

So I went through the painstaking task of going through my credit card statements and debit card statements one by one, logging every single purchase, categorizing them for 2017 and most of 2018. I had to log into Amazon and tons of other websites to get details on what the orders actually were. It took countless hours.

And I'm happy to say that I am done! I'll never know what I used cash to pay for at that time, probably food here and there, probably some train tickets, but otherwise it is all done! Which means I have 4+ years of granular tracking for everything!

[brooklynmoney]

Congrats! It’s very gratifying and eye opening to know where almost every cent goes. I have been tracking every purchase for 12 years. I use Mint. Then I dump that into my own spreadsheet. I also keep separate spreadsheets to track all the clothing and furniture I buy.

[cool7hand]

Congrats! Did you arrive at any insights worth sharing?

[dbfire]

Congrats! Did you arrive at any insights worth sharing?

Just the same cliche ones everyone knows. That tracking things = managing things. You can't manage what you can't see. That I used to spend a lot of money on stuff I didn't need or want? :)