Saturday, March 24, 2012

February to March a Visual Breakdown

As I lay here sick in bed I have some free time.  So what do I do?  I play around with my finances in Excel of course.  You might say I'm a bit obsessed.  I do my best to track every single yen that goes into and out of my pocket and I really enjoy finding new ways to analyze my data and see where my money is going, see where I can cut back, see where I can improve, etc.  Recently I stumbled upon the SUMIF function in Excel and discovered I can now make charts based not only on my spending by expense but also by date.  Here I will give you the same information as a week or so ago but for those more visually minded.

First, expenses:




















I'll have to play with the image size a little so it doesn't always run off the side but I really like this chart.  It gives me a very quick and easy to see visual summary of my spending for February to March.  Obviously I need to cut down on going out to restaurants.  I was surprised to discover that "Alcohol" was actually very low which means I must be doing most of my drinking at bars, izakayas, etc.  

Next, I have a graph which breaks down my spending my the day:



















I think this graph is more interesting and shows the breakdown of my spending by each day.  It goes from the 15th of one month to the 14th of the next.  I get paid on the 15th of every month and find it easiest to calculate spending on the same time frame.  The spike on the 16th is when I pay my rent.  The other big spikes are Costco trips (2/19) and drinking (3/6, 3/9, etc).  What I think is interesting is after my Costco trip I didn't spend much money even on groceries.  However when I did go drinking I continued to spend more money even after forking over tons of cash.  So in other words Costco trip good, eating out at restaurants bad.

I'm going to continue to track my spending like such and will try to include these pictures (perhaps better formatted) in future updates.  

How do you track your money?
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2 comments:

  1. languageotakuMarch 24, 2012 at 9:15 PM

    I'm really impressed by your "bills" section - what does this include? If you say "bills" to me, I imagine electricity, gas, water, phone and internet, but if that were true, your total is ridiculously low! I read that you split the bills with your girlfriend, but still, I'd like to hear in more detail about if you do anything special to save money on your bills. Especially, I heard you like gaming, so I guess you're using some kind of console a lot of the time...

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    1. The Kechi OneMarch 24, 2012 at 10:37 PM

      Nice catch PFJ! The numbers there are a bit funny because of how I was starting to track my bills that month. What escaped was my cell phone bill which would add about another JPY 8,000 to that number. I'll certainly point that out next time. But in general my bills without the cell phone probably come in at about 6,000~7,000 yen. I'll take a look at my lifestyle and see what might lead to such numbers.

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