I am interested in analyzing my financial spending. I don’t do a great job of managing my expenses and often, I am left surprised by my credit card statements at the end of the month. To counter this, I analyzed my expense data to understand where my money is going, how I spend it, and hopefully how I can reduce my expenses. The first step to correcting a behavior is to acknowledge its presence and then hone in on the exact problem. I hope that with this exercise I can achieve that self-improvement, where I am more mindful of my expenses and tracking where I spend my money.

Specifically, I am interested in looking at my spending across 3 credit cards that I own, and understand where I am spending most of my money, how I am spending it, and how often I am able to repay an amount on my credit card and how much I have paid in interest payments. For the purposes of this dashboard, I planned to only analyze transactions that occurred in the year of 2022 and the payments made in that year. This year was my full year of working in a new role where I received a significant pay rise (more than double). The purpose of this evaluation is to understand how much “lifestyle inflation” I went through and to better understand how and when I overspend.

Questions to answer with the data I have

1. What proportion of spending of I have on the 3 cards over every month of the year 2022 and does that remain the same over the year?
2. What proportion of card usage was done every month during the year 2022?
3. Which cards have the longest no-spending streaks in a month in 2022?
4. How much have I accrued on interest payments for each card in 2022?
5. How many times have I overspent i.e. How many times has the payment for a month been lesser than the amount accrued in that month?
6. How many days have I spent more than 500$ in a single month?
7. How much do I spend on groceries vs restaurants in a month?

Data Collection

The data was collected from my online bank accounts. For Discover and US Bank, this was done by going to the Transactions Section of my account and providing a date range from the transactions I wished to get. Almost all banks provide an option to export data in Excel or csv, so I extracted the data in csv format. For my Apple card however, things were a little more challenging since there isn’t a website to access the account. In this case, the statements for each month can be exported via csv on my phone. These were then brought over to my laptop and finally, they were read and binded together to form a single coherent csv.