What do I spend my money on?

The second piece useful analysis to come from my bank statement parsing exercise (the first being how much I spend on coffee) is a graph showing where I spend my money. It’s not a complete picture of my finances because it doesn’t include expenses paid with my credit card, which includes a lot of things like household expenses at Canadian Tire and travel expenses. But it’s a start:

Graph showing my expenses

Comments

Morgan Roderick's picture
Morgan Roderick on July 8, 2009 - 20:03 Permalink

I never realised you drank so much coffee :P

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on July 8, 2009 - 20:48 Permalink

I didn’t know that I drank so much coffee either. My friend Lori made the point that I could purchase a very, very nice coffee maker, and a lot of coffee, for the money I spend out on coffee. Of course I’d have to make it myself, and would miss the benefits of café culture (such as we have it, at least, here in PEI).

oliver's picture
oliver on July 8, 2009 - 21:20 Permalink

hi dad you are good coffe darkr

Andrew MacPherson's picture
Andrew MacPherson on July 10, 2009 - 20:19 Permalink

Yikes, not a good advertisement for heating a heritage home in Charlottetown….

Peter Rukavina's picture
Peter Rukavina on July 10, 2009 - 20:57 Permalink

Yes, approx. $4,000 per year.

Kelly West's picture
Kelly West on July 11, 2009 - 00:25 Permalink

Hi Peter,

You are doing some great stuff. I went through a similar process to analyze my own spending, but went with the CSV download and used Excel as my analysis tool. Without the metadata and with excels sorting as my tool — it was the brute force & ignorance approach to spending analysis. In the end, the most useful bit of information I was able to pull was that I too spend a couple of grand a year on coffee. That was only shocking until I got to the liquor store portion of the spreadsheet…

I would love to have a phone conversation. If you are interested, send me an email and let me know. I work for Central 1 Credit Union — the company that develops and operates MemberDirect for credit unions across the country. Maybe we could do something interesting together.

Rustvaar's picture
Rustvaar on July 13, 2009 - 12:40 Permalink

Ah, I’ve always wanted to create something like this!

Alas I have no idea how I would break down each item and even more to the point, no idea for the timescale. How do you define “Entertainment?” and what’d you do if it was a friend’s birthday … what does that come listed under?

I’m so pedantic I’d find it difficult to deal with.