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Random picture from Hawaii. It’s not my place.
How long have you been tracking your finances? Before sites like mint, personal capital, and ynab came out, I actually made my own private web application to track my finances. That was 10 years ago. Don’t get it twisted, it didn’t nearly have as many bells and whistles as the current sites do. I jerry rigged it together for my use only so it was a pretty generic web app and had a few graphs. Before that, I remember tracking my finances in spreadsheets. It would be fun to dig through an old backup that I have on an external hard drive somewhere.
One interesting thing I found is I make around three times as much more now than I made 10 years ago. I wasn’t doing a whole lot of saving back then. Obviously, I’m not doing the exact same thing I was doing 10 years ago. Perhaps surprisingly, I’m on my second stint at the same company I was 10 years ago. I think I’ve had eight different titles and have been at 3 different companies since then. I’ve gained a lot of valuable knowledge and experience over that last 10 years to get where I am at today.
A couple weekends I had the opportunity to meet Sam from financialsamurai.com. Sam asked an interesting question to the group about what kind of posts do people like or would like to see. Controversial or posts that spark discussion was the common answer. I was kind of shocked but at the same time I’m not. I thought the group would say they’d want to see something more about how-tos, tips, investment advice, etc. There are thousands of personal finance blogs out there. Let’s be real, not every personal finance person out there is a hardcore math nerd. It’s called “personal” finance for a reason. It’s relative to the person and hopefully they’re a good story teller.
Last weekend, I met with my friends John and Sara who I met at Chautauqua. We had tacos and I didn’t indulge in a beer since I’m currently training for a half marathon. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture to post to our group. It was great to catch up and even talk about how Chautauqua was so great. I’m hoping we have monthly dinners as it’s always great catching up with friends.
If you read my last post, the next few months are going to be pretty busy so let’s just cut to the chase. Circling back around to 10 years ago and interesting nuggets that I found. I looked at what I spent on food and I spent an average of 824.75 a month just on food alone. That wasn’t all me but a good part of it was. So that’s my goal for the next five months. I’ll be talking about my tracking of food spending since that is currently a constant challenge for me. The exceptions would be birthdays with close friends and when it’s my turn for dinner with my Chautauqua friends. I can’t host a dinner since my current living arrangement is not set up for that.
Anyway, I’m off to study a little bit before work. So until next week, peace out.
