That’s a lot of money
If you’ve been using Quicken (or another tracking program) for a long time, and you ever want to scare yourself, run a Spending > Itemized Categories Report for the entire time period you’ve tracked. All I can say after doing this is wow.
If I believed Quicken, I’d have spent $913,940.06 in 12 years. Thank goodness it’s not just my spending that I’ve been tracking. (Which would be a trick, because I sure haven’t earned that much money in 12 years…) That nearly-a-million figure also includes partial spending by my husband, my son, my ex-husband, and things that I bought on behalf of other people but was reimbursed for. (And I’ve done a lot of buying for other people - about $44,000 worth.) But still, I’d never have guessed it to be that high.
It was also a little surprising to see which categories had the highest spending. (Some of them were as expected, others weren’t.) Here are the top 10 categories, with the two that surprised me detailed:
Housing
Auto - $79,631 (associated expenses relating to one car for me, 2 cars for my husband, 5 vehicles for my ex-husband, plus a few vacation car rentals)
Net Savings
Credit
School (3 college degrees, but one was free)
Spending (I’ve long-since ditched this vague category for the most part)
Medical
Childcare - $29,316 (from about 18 mos. old to age 9)
Groceries
Dining
January 21st, 2007 at 7:04 am
You are brave. I have been using Quicken since 1993 - fear is an understatement.
January 21st, 2007 at 9:53 am
hehe, I dare you to check! ;)
January 21st, 2007 at 5:57 pm
OOh. Quicken is not happy. Time is ticking buy and the numbers are not there yet. Wow.
$1,045,868.15
This is only from 2003 - evidently my upgrades and file cleaning keeps things down. Thank goodness, I can’t afford a heart attack right now. I have got to find you a hobby. What you are doing can be dangerous!
January 21st, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Fiddling with Quicken isn’t a hobby? :)
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:12 am
a hobby? No, I don’t think so. My whole life is in Quicken. I am obsessed with it. I watch my stocks, track my bills, everything in this program.
I even have each of the kids set up to tracking investments and accounts. I’m a full blown geek.
All businesses are on Quickbooks though. But they make me money. LOL
January 29th, 2007 at 5:45 am
[...] Blunt Money with That’s a Lot of Money [...]
January 29th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
[...] That’s A Lot of Money by Blunt Money was a good read as well. We’ve also run the Quicken reports for several years’ worth of information and been surprised by how much we’d spent on a given category. [...]
January 31st, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Great post… Think I’ve been using Quicken now since 1987… just about 19 years. Sometimes I look at the investing data and think…”If only I would have…” This year I think I’ll save the $ on the Quicken upgrade… ‘06 works fine, and I hear ‘07 is buggy. But it is a wonderful tool, huh? Thanks!
January 31st, 2007 at 10:42 pm
I think what you’re doing is great. Definately keep it up.
Try digging deeper into the numbers and see what you find!
I can’t wait to do it myself when I get back from my trip.
Regards, makingourway
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:12 am
Wow,I wish I had been keeping the records for the past 5 years so I could do that, I bet it would be really scary!!!
It is bad enough knowing that the $125+ a week I spend is 90% consumed in some way or another.
That is $5900 a year, so for the last 7 years I have spent approximatley $40K on food (food in the house) & toilitries.
Eeeeek, I hope that counts fabric (~NOT~).