I Tracked Every Single Penny for a Year

On January 1st, 2025, I committed to logging every single transaction for 365 days. Not just the big stuff — every coffee, every parking meter, every vending machine impulse buy.

I used three tools: my banking app's auto-categorisation, a manual logging spreadsheet for cash transactions, and an AI expense tracker that categorised everything automatically.

Twelve months later, I had 3,847 individual transactions logged. The patterns they revealed were genuinely uncomfortable.

The Numbers I Didn't Want to See

Total spending in 2025: $62,340 on a $78,000 salary (after tax: approximately $61,500)

That's right. I spent more than my take-home pay. The difference came from a small inheritance I'd received and told myself I was "saving." I wasn't saving it. I was subsidising a lifestyle I couldn't afford.

Here's where it went:

Housing: $21,600 (34.7%) — Rent plus utilities. This was actually reasonable for my city.

Food: $9,480 (15.2%) — This was the first shock. I'd estimated $500/month for groceries. The actual number was $790 — because I'd conveniently ignored the $286/month I spent at restaurants and the $142/month on coffee shops and takeout apps.

Transport: $6,840 (11%) — Car payment, insurance, fuel, parking, and the occasional ride-share. No surprises here.

Subscriptions: $3,276 (5.3%) — Twelve active subscriptions. I thought I had five. The other seven were small enough ($4.99 here, $9.99 there) that they'd become invisible. Monthly total: $273.

The Ghost Category: $4,200 (6.7%) — This is what shook me. Over $4,000 spent on transactions I literally cannot remember. Small purchases under $15 that individually felt like nothing: convenience store snacks, app purchases, in-game upgrades, random Amazon orders that arrived and went straight into a drawer.