202. The Sexiest Thing You Can Do With Your Money

It's Tracking Your Spending

Deep in my Google spreadsheets this month, I noted all my little expenses like my multiple Amazon shipments and my Black Friday must haves, and I found myself thinking back to when I first learned about the benefits of tracking my spending.

Sammie was the one who introduced me to the concept after going down another Financial Independence rabbit hole. She preached the good word about how tracking her spending was helping her, but I’ll be honest, I was a skeptic.

How could such a simple yet tedious sounding task help improve my finances? At the time, I was a decent saver, so I thought I was doing enough.

I decided to give it a try in 2020. I was trapped in my apartment, alone in Austin and was starting to think about leaving my job. I enjoyed learning and putting things into action, so I started tracking my spending. This is where I had my first real unlock.

When it comes to personal finance, we often miss the important thing which is that it is personal. This is important when it comes to tracking your spending.

Whenever I pull up my credit card, copy and paste my statement into a spreadsheet and look at what categories are hitting my top expenses, I learn something about how I am spending my money. Of course, I learn what my top expenses are. But I also see whether or not my expenses are lining up with my values and interests.

For example, I no longer eat out that much. However, when I was living in San Francisco, I ate out for every meal. At first, I enjoyed this. I loved being in a new city and discovering diverse places like my friends go to Burmese restaurant or the grocery store that sold the best sushi in the back (not that I ever went myself thanks to spending even more money through Doordash). After a while though, I was simply doing it because I didn’t try to cook myself and wasn’t thinking about it. It was a habit and not something I loved. I was losing money while gaining weight even though I no longer valued what I was spending money on.

Now, I enjoy cooking for myself, particularly since I can eat healthier meals and in portions that are more comfortable for my tiny frame. If I see eating out creeping up as an expense, it often means I’m making too many trips to Chik Fil A after my morning yoga class and forgetting to put time on my calendar to go grocery shopping.

Tracking your spending doesn’t have to only be about cutting expenses to match your values though. It’s also a great way to notice patterns.

One thing that became clear to me when I started tracking my spending was that I was spending hundreds, if not thousands of extra dollars because I had a really bad habit of waiting to book airplane tickets. I used to be the worst about booking trips like weddings or international trips that I’ve known about for months, one or two weeks before I would go. My friends would often check in on me to see if I was coming, even though I RSVP’d and had it on my calendar. I don’t even know why I did this, I think I assumed I’ll do it later and then forgot about it until the date creeped up on me.

When I was looking at my spending for November, one of my top expenses was a plane ticket I booked to Vancouver for my friend Alisha’s wedding in July. It was about $300. I don’t feel bad at all that I spent the money on that ticket. Instead, I’m proud of myself for booking insanely early. That’s a coast to coast trip for me, and I saw if I waited, not only would I likely be paying a lot more, I’d probably be stuck doing a double layer in Edmonton at 3:00am. Proud money lesson learned!

In this episode of Build A Wealthy Spirit, Sammie and I dive even deeper into the benefits of tracking your spending. We are making it sexy because there is truly nothing sexier than taking control of your finances.

Community Shout Outs:

• Thank you to Paul for doing the “Thank You Letter To Your Past Self” exercise from last episode and sharing with us what he’s grateful for. If you are interested in Real Estate, Paul has a great YouTube channel here!

• Thank you to Dillan for your comment about last week’s newsletter! He mentioned how he appreciated the vulnerability in the essay. Dillan helps creators grow their YouTube channels and has great conversations with different creators online about their different strengths. I’ve received so many positive comments from our conversation together, which you can check out below.

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