I took some time today to organize my finances. I downloaded all CSVs with my monthly expenditures from my credit card provider, and made similar files by hand for my bank. Then I prepared a simple script to parse these files, categorize them, and unify them.

There is still a bunch of stuff to do, but I hope that this will give me a better ability to visualize where my money is going, so that I can plan how much I want to allocate for savings, fun, self-care, and charity.

Anyway, one thing that I noticed was the huge change in my bank transaction patterns pre and post pandemic. Simply speaking, pre-pandemic I had A LOT going on in terms of income and outcome, most of it my expenditures with work trips, and reimbursements from the university. It was super confusing to understand the numbers from that era. After the pandemic hit, work travel went to zero, as well as dining out and holiday trips, so my finances became minimal. Salary, rent, utilities, a bit of online shopping, that’s it. I guess that is one way to think about the changes of the pandemic.

Now I’m starting to get international travel back on the menu, I should do a better job of organizing that than I did before.

Also, somewhere in early 2021 I took a very small pay cut. I need to figure out what that’s all about.

Gosh, I’m getting old…