Spending Data

I failed pretty hard at my reading goal this year. For me, reading is just a matter of being in the habit or being out of it. I can do some good reading, and can make my way through some books, but only if I’m on a roll. It also largely depends on what I have on my phone that’s distracting me. 

I always read at least a little each year, but I found myself being really inspired last year by several friends on social media who were sharing their reading stats for the year. These friends were reading 50 books and more! 

The math works out. When you’re spending time picking up your book instead of your phone, it’s not unreasonable to assume you could hit these sorts of stats as well. 

As someone who loves to read and learn, I knew that I was missing out on great books by not reading more. So, as naturally happens when New Year’s rolls around, I set an ambitious goal. Honestly, I can’t remember the exact number(I’ve blocked it out), but I want to say it was around 70. Since I find myself either being in the habit of reading or being out of it, my reading goal for the year would simply require that I do those things I know push my reading along to complete this number of books. 

By the end of January, I was already looking to change my goal. I bumped it down to 50 thinking that would be more realistic. 

The next time I changed my goal, I just deleted it. 

I didn’t hit 50 books this year. I didn’t hit 25. 

I was laughing about this story with a good friend this week who reads a lot and she had some great common sense advice. 

She uses the number of books she read last year to help her decide how many books she’d like to read this year. 

A common sense solution, but one I hadn’t originally been willing to give a shot. I wanted to go big or not at all.

But if we pay attention to these small points of data in our lives, it helps us improve and make more informed, smarter choices. 

For money, to make decisions on how to create your budget in the first place, you need data on how you’ve been spending in the past. Using a tool like YNAB, you can view how you’ve been doing within the last year. 

You only need categories for things you need to track. For me, we had been using a large “Needs” category that captured all the essentials for our household, such as groceries, personal toiletries, paper towels, over-the-counter medicines from the pharmacy, and so on. 

But we kept having trouble with going over in this category. It just didn’t seem to be working and really, I have no idea why. I couldn’t tell you whether we’d been spending more on groceries(likely) or if we needed to cut back on a few of those extra things we just feel like are needed (equally likely).

I needed more data to give us a more accurate budget. So I decided to split up our one big category and here’s what I came up with:

• Groceries- because I want to see exactly how much it costs us just for home food. Nothing else should go into this category except the food we eat. 
• Paper Goods/Cleaning Supplies- This is another area that’s pretty important. When we need it we need it, but I wanted to track it separately from the other two categories. 
• Personal/Pharmacy/Other-This covers everything from personal toiletries, skincare, makeup, over-the-counter meds, and any other needs we might have.

With this new set up, it gives us more accurate data into how we’re actually needing to spend right now, and with better data, we can make more intelligent and accurate budgeting decisions. 

Of course, this is the sort of nightmare that stops people from budgeting in the first place. “I don’t want to have to track every penny!” The truth is, you may not need to. For some who want to simply keep their spending below a certain threshold, tracking monthly bills separately from a big monthly spending category may be enough. 

But for us, watching individual categories like this is just too important to keep from overspending.

So consider the data that you might be missing from making informed budgeting decisions. If you’ve been having trouble with a category, consider breaking it apart to see if you can figure out what the deal is.