The budgeting spreadsheet I use has a nice little feature on a sheet called “Overview.” This sheet will tell me exactly how much money is left in each account. It will also tell me how much money I had as income in every month that I’ve budgeted and finally the biggest section on that sheet is the part where it shows how much has been spent on a year to date basis broken down by the categories I have.
Why did I ignore that section?
If I had watched that section more closely over the last year I would have been able to catch when things started going out of whack. So how out of whack were things? Rent for one, has only gone up over the years we have rented, yet this past year it only accounted for 8.1% of our spending. Said another way $9,768.68 was spent on rent and that was only 8.1% of all the spending we did in that year.
The largest amount of spending has been on an expense I can’t really talk about. Needless to say that most of that spending is covered by an insurance company, so it is a rather moot point and not something we can cut back on anyways. That spending was 16.3% of all our spending.
Here is the ugly part, my hobby. I spent the year acquiring stuff I needed for the various competitions I wanted to enter. That resulted in a lot of spending, $13,336.53 is a pretty big number. I blew that acquiring stuff that I needed. It was 11.1% of our expenses last year. The second biggest spending category was my hobby
Had I looked at that overview page and browsed the categories section for even a few minutes last year I would have seen how out of whack everything was and could have changed to compensate somewhat. The damage is done and last year is over. Looking forward my goal is to drop spending in that category down to 5% or lower of total expenses.
That was ugly. Tomorrow the bad.
