[cromka]

I’m with you on that one. Been tracking my personal finances since 2011 and I have yet found a need to go deeper with analysis. Although I can imagine it could be interesting to go extra deep, e.g. to observe changes in my nutritional habits based on my grocery receipts juxtaposed with, say, my bloodwork. But even then it’d be a gimmick as I could not potentially rely on any correlation noticed. I’m sure someone could come up with a better example.

In any case, unless tracking gets super easy, with digital receipts saved directly onto our mobile devices and standardized for processing, I just couldn’t be bothered to break down paper receipts.

That BTW makes me wonder why have we not seen e-receipts standardized yet. We can pay wirelessly with devices, so why not save some more meta data about the transaction, including the receipt itself? Seems like a low hanging fruit, also saving tons of paper.

[freddie_mercury]

I agree. I've also been tracking my family's personal finances for about that long.

You have to ask yourself what you're going to do with the data. Don't just collect data for data's sake.

The most granular I've ever needed is things like: "wow, I've spent way too much on hobbies in the past 3 months" or "we've spent way too much eating out this month" or "the kid's sports are getting out of hand". Or even "we can afford to spend a lot more on vacations over the rest of the year".

Those are all very top level categories. I can't imagine a world where I'd ever make a lifestyle change based on how I spend on meat over the past six months.

And if you're not actually making a change then the data is just data hoarding.

[cromka]

Yup. Although even if you’re not making any changes based on your habits, it’s still helpful to track money spent to know where your money actually is, especially the liabilities. Except you don’t even need to track expenses at all, outside of the generic “Expenses” category.