Finally Figured Out Where Our Money Actually Goes Each Month

We budgeted. We tracked. We still had no idea where money went.

End of month: less money than expected. Beginning of month: made a budget. Middle of month: forgot about budget entirely.

THE BLIND SPOT

Looked at bank statements. Hundreds of transactions. Started categorizing manually. Got bored after 30 minutes. Gave up. Repeated next month.

Subscriptions we forgot existed. Small charges that add up. Categories bleeding into each other. Amazon purchases could be anything from groceries to electronics.

Our "dining out" budget was supposed to be $400/month. Actual spending: we had no idea.

THE ANALYZER I BUILT

Bank sends monthly statement to email. Workflow triggers automatically. Extracts every transaction from the PDF.

Categorizes each one based on merchant name and description. Starbucks goes to dining. Fry's goes to groceries. Shell goes to transportation. Subscriptions identified by recurring same-amount charges.

Calculates totals by category. Compares to our budget targets. Flags categories where we overspent.

Identifies large transactions over $500. Lists all subscriptions found. Calculates savings rate for the month.

Sends summary to our phones every month when statement arrives.

THE REALITY CHECK

Dining out actual: $847 not $400

Subscriptions we forgot: 3 totaling $67/month

Groceries actual: $200 under budget

Transportation: Way over from that road trip we forgot to account for

First month was depressing. But knowing beats guessing.

Cancelled the forgotten subscriptions. Set realistic dining budget. Actually started hitting targets because we could see reality.

The categorization learned our patterns. First month needed corrections. By month 3 it knew our merchants.

This is the workflow i used.