I like to believe that my parents raised me to be pretty responsible with my money. I’ve always been careful about spending and big on saving – when I was ten I decided to open my own savings account to make sure I wouldn’t spend too much. However, ten year-olds have way less monetary responsibilities than adults do, and I started to notice a fairly big problem through my junior and senior years of college: I have no idea what I spend.
While the habits that I learned when I was younger still stand – I’m careful about making big purchases, I try to avoid buying things that are unnecessary, and I have a savings account intended for use in college that I haven’t even touched – I have not been doing a good job at tracking my smaller purchases, and those add up.
So, to solve this problem, I decided to develop an budgeting tool to help me figure out how much I’m spending and on what, and then, if necessary, reduce my spending in areas where I might be a bit reckless. Enter Excel.
Because Adult. 