Personal finance is difficult because well, it’s personal. It’s something that we attach emotion to. It’s something that we take personally when someone or something attacks “our” money.

We feel like it’s our money and we can do what we damn well please with it and no one can tell us otherwise.

We feel like it’s okay to “treat yo’self” because you’ve worked sooo hard lately!

We use money to cope. We use money in an attempt to make us feel better. We use money to do stupid things. We use money to make us feel powerful. We use money to make us feel like we’re in control.

I’ve done all the above with money and I’m sure that you have too.

That’s why it’s been extremely difficult to dig deep into our personal finances lately.

It sucks to face the music and realize that your personal finances suck even though you consider yourself a “Personal Finance” blogger.

We’ve had some big life changes lately. Nothing bad. Mainly we moved and we’ve been working a ridiculous amount of hours at work.

We’ve been on auto-pilot lately; just rolling with the punches.

But it’s time to get our shit together and our finances in order. Yeah, life happens and it’s difficult but that’s no excuse.

It’s time to take control. It’s time to get more aggressive paying off our debts. It’s time to start getting ahead. We work too damn hard to not have anything to show for it.

I tried Personal Capital months ago to figure out our finances but the personal part of personal finance made it difficult to look at the numbers and it didn’t last long. Ignorance was bliss. Knowing how bad we sucked with our money was something that would just add stress to our lives. It would be the straw that would break the camel’s back.

For some reason, it’s easier for me to look at my business’s account statement. That’s probably because it’s the business’s money, not “our” money. There’s no emotional attachment when it comes to the business and it’s money like there is with our personal accounts.

It’s much easier to look at Personal Capital now when looking at our finances from a business mindset and point-of-view. There’s cash flow with income coming in and expenses going out. There needs to be a budget. There are assets and liabilities. We need to run our personal finances more like a business and I think that this is a step in the right direction to getting our balance sheets more…well, balanced.

We had some idea with how our finances were going but nothing concrete to go off of. Our finances haven’t been “normal” lately since we’ve been going through the process of buying a house. We haven’t been saving much lately which we knew. We figured we brought in slightly more than what went out. We thought we spent a lot on eating out.

After looking at the numbers we were pretty spot on. But the one thing that really stuck out was exactly how much we were spending on groceries and eating out.

It’s so embarrassing that I’m not going to share the amount.

But let’s just say that we almost spend as much on food as we do on our mortgage.

That’s crazyyyyyy!

But at least we now know and we can come up with possible solutions to our elephant in the room.

We started the change when we stopped breaking the bank with breakfast but there’s still work left to be done.

The only way to go from here is up, right?

 

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That link about Personal Capital above isn’t an affiliate link but the following are: I sell old books using BookScouter. I sell stuff on Etsy and eBay. I used Shopify to run my old online business. I make some money by taking pictures of my grocery receipts with Ibotta. I’m Marc the Shark , this is the Self Employed Movement, and yes, these are affiliate links.