How I analyse my personal finances

The first area of focus to track is the outflows. This includes all expenses that we effectively consume, so this would be items such as food, entertainment, living expenses such as mortgage and utilities, vacations, health insurance, restaurants, transportation and many more. Ultimately, this would exclude any savings, retirement contributions or investments. 

The monthly expenses dashboard shows the trends of our monthly expenses. This becomes very interesting once many months are able to be plotted as a valuable average can be generated. From the spending trend by month, we can see how much on average we spend per month, which gives us directly an indication of how much on average our life costs. This is very useful to point to our baseline. 

The second visual to the left, below the monthly trend let us know how much each payee is contributing as well as the top categories per expense type. Prior to 2020, only I was only tracking my finances, but in 2020 after my wife and I got married, we started to track our finances jointly. We also hold a joint account together from which we make joint payments. We find this way of managing our finances is really helpful as she has her own bank account with which she can spend on whatever she wants and has full autonomy over it. I also enjoy the same flexibility with my own bank account, but we also have a joint account from which we can make joint payments such as all the expenses for our current home. In the graph the blue cover is me, the green is our joint account and the purple is my wife’s. To the right of this chart, there is a scatter plot (bubble chart) which shows in detail every expense that has ever been made by either one of us since January 1st, 2020. 

With these three visuals, we are able to see if we have an expensive (above average) month or a cheaper (below average) month. We can then also assess who is paying more per category and what are the most expensive categories, this allows us to adjust spending habits if necessary. Additionally we are also able to see what are the largest individual expenses within the bubble chart., this is useful when drilling down to the detail level. As an example, if we were to analyse the categories of “Restaurants & Drinks”, we could then also see what we spend per restaurant in the scatter plot to the right as well as how much we spent on restaurant per month as well as the average since 2020. By filtering like this, for our situation we see that August 2020 was the most expensive month, on average we spend 217 euros per month on restaurants and that apparently we love Sushi 🙂!