Had to track every dollar for 3 months before I saw where I was bleeding money

I thought I was pretty good with my budget, always checking my bank balance and staying out of credit card debt. But my savings just wasn't growing no matter what. Last January I sat down and wrote out every single thing I spent money on for 90 days straight. Turns out I was spending about 80 bucks a month on coffee and snacks from the gas station near my office in Phoenix. That's almost a thousand dollars a year just for a mid-morning caffeine fix I never even thought about. My coworker Dave pointed it out when he saw me grabbing a bagel and a latte every day around 10am. I started bringing a thermos from home and a banana, and now I save around 60 dollars a month without missing those little treats. Anyone else find a small regular expense that added up way more than you expected?

3 comments

3 Comments

aaronsullivan6d ago

I read somewhere that the average person spends like $1,200 a year on vending machines and convenience store snacks without even thinking about it. That pretty much lines up with what you found with your gas station coffee and bagels. I had a similar thing with my Spotify subscription for a while, I signed up for the family plan with my sister but she stopped paying me months ago and I never noticed. It was only like 15 bucks a month but over a year that adds up to almost 200 dollars for something I barely used. It's wild how those little daily habits just slip under the radar until you actually write them down.

nancyg146d ago

Blew my mind when I actually added up what I was spending on energy drinks from the gas station every morning. I was grabbing one on the way to work and another around 2 PM, thought it was like three bucks a day but I never factored in the random candy bars or bags of chips. Put it on a spreadsheet for a month and it came out to almost a hundred and fifty bucks just for stuff I didn't even really want.

karenb971d ago

The convenience store thing is a trap because they design the whole checkout experience to make you grab extras while you're waiting. That $150 a month could be a whole car insurance payment or a decent phone bill, and you're literally flushing it down the toilet for sugar and caffeine. Once you start thinking of those impulse buys as "monthly bills" instead of "small treats," it changes how you look at every single purchase.