My Journey into Budgeting
I always get a guilty feeling when I buy a non-necessasity item. Non-necessasity item is anything that I could do without. A camera would be a perfect example for this - unless you’re a professional photographer. While I blame this for the fact me growing up poor, no matter how frugal I am I get this guilty feeling when I’m spending.
As solution for this I decided to follow budget and track my expenses. So when amygdala complains, frontal lobes have numbers to work to back the reasoning. For reference amygdala is the part of brain that work with the feelings related stuff while frontal lobe is doing the reasoning.
So moving on to my solution, In order to budget properly I need to see where I stand at any given time. For that I need to record all my expenses. I can’t automate recording since sometimes I pay with cash. (though that’s pretty rare, it happens).
So I need a mechanism to easily record expenses as they happen. Then a way to double-check my entries periodically.
To record the expenses I created a Numbers sheet and a Apple shortcut. I can invoke the shortcut from the home screen, and enter the amount + description of the expense. Then shortcut will enter this data to the numbers' sheet with the current date and default category. I could have modified the shortcut to ask the category and skip having a default category. But 7/10 times my expense is on the default category. So having a default seems a better trade-off
Then I’ve a script to scan the bank notifications and check those records with the manual entries. It logs into a email account and parse all the email receipts related to expenses. That reminds me, I’ve a separate email account which my expense receipts get forwarded to. While this doesn’t check all the records it can cover more than 90% expenses in my case.
I’ve being doing this now for more than a year, and it involved lots of minor tweaks. For example, I didn’t use a shortcut at the beginning. With this system now I have a more understanding on my spending habits, and more importantly my expenses are mostly guilt free. (Though some of them were quite stupid in hindsight)
If you'd like to use this method, download the linked numbers file and copy the shortcut to your phone. You'll need to update the path to the numbers file in the shortcut.
Link numbers sheet (figures are for illustrative purpose only)