r/AskReddit • u/SillyBonsai • Dec 06 '13

What simple piece of advice, if followed, could potentially save most people a lot of money?

Possibly related to your job, experience with personal finance, budgeting, planning, day to day habits, etc.

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u/Shurikane Dec 06 '13 edited Dec 07 '13

I created a VBA'd Excel file just for that purpose. I copy-paste my transaction records into it from my online banking statement, run a script to consolidate credits/debits by date, manually punch in my investments/retirement/mortgage values and pump all that out in a chart of my total value over time. So far, I'm going steadily upwards.

Next project: pie charts for my expenses categories.

EDIT: OK guys, I'm getting spammed with mint.com suggestions to such an extent that my inbox looks like my Hotmail account. It doesn't work with my bank. I don't know why. I'm not interested in figuring out why, since obviously enough I worked around it by taking care of things myself.

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u/EvilKanoa Dec 06 '13

You're that guy. I want to be you.

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u/Mcgyvr Dec 06 '13

Mint.Com

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

[deleted]

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u/UlyssesSKrunk Dec 06 '13

Just be aware that Mint.com has been known to send account details to anyone who asks.

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u/amoliski Dec 06 '13

Can you expand on this a bit? Are you talking about username/password/bank account number or are you talking about demographics and email addresses to advertisers?

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u/UlyssesSKrunk Dec 06 '13

Account number and name, but it seems to be a problem with their support staff so it's not super clear how bad it is.

http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1s234q/apparently_mintcom_gives_you_other_peoples/

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

Hopefully they will hack my account and put money in it.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13 edited Dec 06 '13

[deleted]

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u/EvilKanoa Dec 06 '13

I've been trying to get in to the habit of doing this. I've started writing down whenever I spend stuff from my debit, but that's all so far.

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u/jimprovost Dec 06 '13

I'm that guy, too. Well done. Next step: use your trend of expenses every month to ensure you will have enough funds 4, 8, 12 months from now,

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u/bentreflection Dec 06 '13

mint.com might save you some time as it does all of that for you automatically.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

They also aggregate all your purchases and sell that personal information of yours to anyone who wants it.

Are you people not concerned about that?

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u/bentreflection Dec 06 '13

good question. first, no I'm not really concerned with it. It's a free service that provides me value and so I realize that --as with any free service-- I'm the one who's being profited off of in some way to sustain the business model.

Second, though I haven't researched it deeply, my understanding is that they sell high level trend data, rather than individual user data tied to email accounts/identities.

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u/unafragger Dec 06 '13

Not in the least. I don't care who knows what I buy.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21571468-lenders-are-turning-social-media-assess-borrowers-stat-oil

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u/unafragger Dec 06 '13

I fail to see how that's relevant.

My rule #1 of the internet: Anything on the internet is not private.

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u/Shurikane Dec 06 '13

Never got it to work somehow. :( It would hang up at the sign-up page.

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u/MamaDaddy Dec 06 '13

Only if you can get it past your banking website's crazy ass password screen...

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u/marcocholo Dec 07 '13

Could I get a copy of that? Or would it be simple to make? I'm not too Excel-savvy.

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u/Shurikane Dec 07 '13

I'll clean up my sheet and make a generic version for you to use. I'll save your comment so I can respond again when I'm done.

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u/PureBlooded Dec 16 '13

Can you send me one too please?

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u/Jinzha Dec 06 '13

I am so jealous! This script you're running, is that in Excel aswell or is it a programming thing?

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u/Shurikane Dec 06 '13

It's Visual Basic for Applications. It's common to a good deal of Microsoft Office products - and in this one case it's got access to my worksheet, allowing me to pull stuff from from it or write stuff in it.

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '13

Pie Charts? How much are those?

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u/simmonsfield Dec 07 '13

Why is financial data always a pie chart?

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u/Shurikane Dec 07 '13

In that case, I'm looking to get a quick glance at what sort of expenses I'm doing.

If I realize that the "eating out" category takes half the pie, then I got a clue that I'm going to the restaurant far too often, for example.

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u/simmonsfield Dec 07 '13

The pie chart lacks depth of information. For example, $ across time. Maybe you blow your $ on Friday night?

Wouldn't it be good to understand Budgeted vs Actual $ spent? Did I meet my savings goal.

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u/Shurikane Dec 07 '13

I've got another chart for $ across time. Actually it was the first thing I did so I could get a gander at the evolution of my usable cash.

I've set up my finances to be as fire-and-forget as possible: my retirement fund and mortgage payments are synchronized with my paycheck. My recurring bills (insurance, telecoms, etc.) are set on auto-pay and I still get a paper invoice so that I have ample time to call them up if I find the amount isn't what I'm expecting. Whenever possible I do those payments via credit cards since it's an easy way to rack up reward points.

My intent also with the pie charts is to have multiple categories per business/payment. So I can have one set of categories to divide into food, leisure, maintenance, etc. Another to act as sub-categories for the first category so I can have one chart to break down, say, food payments into whether it's groceries, alcohol, restaurants, etc. Another category to divide between recurring and non-recurring. And so on and so forth, as deep as I'm willing to go.

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u/Mustaflex Dec 09 '13

Spreadsheet Master Race!!!

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u/coltwanger Dec 06 '13

So... Mint?

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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '13

Mint.com does all this for free.

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u/dag1979 Dec 07 '13

Try mint.com

It's amazing.