Year End Finances

Among the anal-retentive things that I do, I check my credit card activity online regularly, and dump the output to an Excel spreadsheet. Hey--don't knock it--I found out fraudulent activity on one of my credit cards ("Womens' Accessories" at "Underworld" in Montreal) the day after the transaction posted.

As a result, I can figure out what I have spent money on this past year (using formulas like =SUMIF($F$181:$F$755,"=Auto",$C$181:$C$755)). So what did I find out?

Well, the coolest thing I figured out: I spent more money on good booze than on gasoline this past year. Yeah. I'm happy on both counts.


(i.e., I'd rather give my money to Scotch distillers, Guinness and local breweries than Exxon-Mobil and the House of Saud).

And in both cases, each total was less than one month's rent. And my rent is pretty cheap.

Note that this is not meant as some type of Look at my carbon footprint, bay-bee statement--I still take commercial flights for work and for fun travel, so that blows the budget. I assume that there's significant embodied energy in my Scotch collection--but they again, we're talking about something under 10 gallons--less than a car tankful. I don't think we can map it to the embodied energy of ethanol used for fuel--they don't distill booze to that level of purity (my collection is mostly 80-150 proof/40-75% EtOH). Also, my budget includes (non-distilled) beer.

But speaking of work--I got about $14,000 in frequent flyer miles due to reimbursed work expenses. Yeah.

Other items of interest in 2008: spent about 2x rent on tools--a bit of a splurge this past year. Also, about 1x rent in donations--WBUR, WGBH, NRDC, MassBike, the Obama campaign.

But overall, in terms of year end finances, as for my investments... oy.