20 Years of Spending:
What I’ve Learned from Tracking Every Dollar
What does a family’s money look like over 20 years?
I started tracking every dollar in 2006 when we couldn’t afford not to. I’m still tracking today — and the data has become a surprisingly honest record of our entire life. No estimates. No rounding. Just 20 years of real numbers.
What you’ll learn here
- 20 years of real Quicken data, one household
- How two kids, three houses, and a pandemic changed our spending
- What inflation actually looks like in one family’s grocery bill
- The months the numbers told us something we didn’t expect
Most Recent
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Our 2026 vacation budget is $40,000. Our mortgage payment is $2,267 a month — $27,204 a year. So yes, we are budgeting nearly 50% more for travel than we pay on our house. When I…
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January had a few over-budget categories, but once I dug into them, nothing was shocking. This is exactly
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In 2006, our rent was $788 for a 2 bedroom apartment, our monthly grocery bill was under $300, and I started tracking every cent we spent. I’ve tracked my household finances for 20 years -…
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Hi & Welcome
Nice to meet you!
I’m a longtime personal finance nerd who has tracked every dollar I’ve earned and spent since 2006. This blog is a place to share real data, long-term trends, and lessons learned from nearly two decades of managing money in the real world. I’m not here to sell anything or preach perfection—just to document what intentional spending actually looks like over time.
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