2005 Year in Review - Finances Edition
For those of you who don’t know me very well, I’m totally fascinated with numbers. Whether it be sports statistics, software performance metrics or money, I love to play with and look at numbers. After my recent focal review at work, I was reminded that I hadn’t really been paying attention to my finances. I used to update a spreadsheet weekly to tell me how much money I had, how well my retirement accounts were performing and how much debt I had in loans and credit cards.
So today I popped onto my MBNA account and downloaded all of my statements from 2005 in CSV format. I threw them into a database and did a little SQL-fu on them and learned some interesting things:
- I really don’t want to talk about my Best Buy habit (holy crap…#1 ?!?!?). Update: Oh yeah…I bought a laptop last year so the Best Buy numbers are inflated.
- Chevron was high (#2) on my list in terms of total money spent on the year. I gassed up 92 times and spent almost $3,000 on gas last year. That’s 1.77 trips to the gas station every week. Each trip cost over $32 on average. That says I probably need a better commute vehicle. I’d say I should take the train more, but that costs more than gas does. $44 round trip just to get from Sacramento to Santa Clara. I still need to get from Santa Clara to San Jose.
- I spent over $1,700 at Toyota dealerships. That’s probably lower than it should be, actually. I think I skimped on some oil changes during the year. Regardless, that means I spent over $4,700 on my truck during the year (gas and maintenance combined).
- Payee #4 on my list was a grocery store (Bel Air). I made 37 trips and spent over $2,200 (my wife probably picked up several other trips since we usually go once a week). That’s roughly $60 per trip.
- My ISP was #6 on the payee list, sucking down a whopping $1,300. If I were to drop my bandwidth (go from 6.0/768 down to 1.5/384) I could cut my bill in half.
- Coming in at #9 was good-old Comcast, bleeding me of $1,000.
- Cingular came in at #10, also bleeding me of roughly $1,000. Shame I pay so much for something I use so little. I ought to look into some sort of prepaid phone or something.
- My hosting provider (the people who host this blog) took me for $200. It would have been higher, but I did get some kickback from them because of some referral work I did.
That’s just a quick sampling of the data. I just did a group by on the names of the stores that I did purchases at. I want to lump each purchase into a category and then look at the categories. It will also be interesting to merge this information with my wife’s statements to see how we did as a whole. She handles all the utilities (gas, electricity, garbage, etc). I could also merge in how much we spent on our mortgage, insurance and taxes. But that might just depress me.
Anyway, it feels good knowing where my money is going, even if I’m not completely happy to see some of the numbers. At least now I know what needs addressing.
