Hand-Made Scripts Coming Along Slowly

08/22/15

Today I made some final little edits to my hidden receipt_breakdown.js script. It reads all the "TOTAL" items in my receipts.json file and spits out the count from each top-level label. The most-recent spit out being (with various fields omitted for privacy reasons):

Where I've currently hard-coded the script to ignore all purchases before August 1st. Not too shabby, I believe this month will the be first we've successfully managed to spend less than $11 per day on food on average (bulk plus grocery equals food spending, more or less).

I've more-or-less been copying each receipt I've gotten by hand into this receipts.json file since May 2015. There's some missing money transcations in there (like the stuff that's done purely online), but partial tracking is better than no tracking. Also, I'll slowly fix those things. I'm also trying to get into the habit of noting how much I've bought of a thing when that thing is a consumable. Buying 110 servings of quaker oats at $8.99 is much better than buying 30 servings at $5.99, for example. Capturing that may be useful, though seeing it being bought much less frequently could be equally powerful.

Just the act of keeping my receipts, and making the whole process a bit more manual has been a powerful contributor to better spending habits. I'm really realizing how much money is going where. Further, making my own scripts is so much more satisfying than Mint, even though it's certainly worse by any real metric right now.

I think this thing can really grow into something really special. I just got to improve it little-by-little as I see fit.