Loading…
2
Rant: I spent 14 months buying coffee out because my $60 budget spreadsheet lied about my actual spending
I keep a budget in a basic spreadsheet, nothing fancy. For over a year I had a coffee line item set at $60 a month because that's what I thought I spent. Then in March my debit card got flagged for fraud and the bank sent me a full statement, and I sat down and added up every coffee purchase. It was $238 a month. I was buying a $4.75 cold brew at the place by my office in Sacramento almost every single morning, plus a second one some afternoons. Here's the part that bugs me. My budget balanced every month, so I thought things were fine. What actually happened is I was pulling money from my grocery category to cover coffee and never looked at why groceries kept running short. I was budgeting off what I felt like I spent instead of what the account said. Now I go through the actual bank app once a week, no guessing. Anyone else find out their budget was basically fiction once you checked the real numbers?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
valc911mo ago
My dad did the same thing with his truck payments for like two years, swore he was paying $340 but the actual statement said $415 because he forgot about the insurance bundle they tacked on at the dealership. He only found out when my mom went to refinance the house and the loan guy pulled everything. He was so sure of his number that he argued with the bank lady on the phone for twenty minutes before she read him the paperwork line by line. The gap had been quietly eating his fun money the whole time and he never once questioned why he was broke by the 20th.
3