[2bikemike]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Okay. (Symbolically brushing hands off.). It's all in the accountants' hands now, aside from two K1s on investments who are illegally late every stinkin' year. So I have to file an extension again because these two companies can't get their act together.

One of the best things about living in the modern world is that it's convenient to figure out my spending and maximize my deductions and stuff. I also use tax season as a way to summarize and classify all of my spending for the year. I have three credit cards and a couple of bank accounts, so I can pull down every penny I spend over the course of the year and classify it.

- The credit cards are nice because I can download Excel files that have spending classifications already built in. I'll adjust the categories a bit each year, but they're a great place to start.
- I pay most of my regular bills via electronic checking, and I can download an activity report for the year. An annoyance is that my bank will only let me download a pdf that doesn't convert into usable Excel data, so I have to enter each record manually. But at least all of the data is there.
- We write a handful of manual checks over the course of the year, and my wife makes Venmo transactions, but those are generally easy to figure out and classify since they're in the bank activity records, and there aren't a lot of them. ATM withdrawals are also recorded, and are very infrequent.

The only things I can't classify are a few Venmo transactions (not a big deal), the cash ATM withdrawals (not a big deal), and a ton of 'Amazon shopping' charges on my credit cards. The Amazon stuff includes some normal subscriptions like coffee and toothpaste and toilet paper, and I suspect that my wife also uses it to launder money spent on clothing purchases since I gently nag her every year about how much money she spends on clothing. But I can't tell what each Amazon purchase is, so I just have to lump them under 'shopping'. I guess I could go back to the Amazon records and classify each purchase, but it's not worth the effort.

The spending summary is a lot of work, but it's really nice because I can ...

1. Be sure to get all of the maintenance write-offs for my apartment.
2. Get any other deductions. For example, we're spending a fortune on health care this year since we both have to buy insurance on the private market, and we also had some major expenses on other things this year like hearing aids, glasses, and medical tests. We're well over the point this year to be able to deduct some costs.
3. Track and monitor our spending to be sure we're in good shape on retirement funds.
4. Gently nag my wife about clothing expenditures.
5. Gently nag myself about travel expenditure.
6. Track spending on home projects for capital gains purchases if we ever move.

We pretty much put everything on a rewards credit card. Which makes it rather easy to track spending. I used to feel guilty about putting a $1.50 on the credit card but have gotten over it.

We have some things that come out of the Electronic pay from our Checking account. But my OCD of budgeting, I track all spending on a spreadsheet that I created. All line items have a running total. I download the .CSV file from the credit card company every month, modify and re-sort that data and plug that info into my spread sheet. I log into the bank about once a week and anything in or out of the account goes into the spread sheet.

If someone asked what I spent on groceries 5 years ago I can tell you!

And when I read how much you spent on medical insurance I about fell over. We are about 1/2 of what you pay! Even with our LTC coverage we are less than $2k. I guess I am very fortunate that I was able to continue with my employers plan after retirement!