I see it a lot with dairy (yogurt, cheese - the medium cheddar is still 440g but the old cheddar is 400g for the same price, and they used to all be the same size same price).
Last year frozen raspberries moved from being in a 600g bag like most of the other fruit to a 400g bag (same height and width, not sure if a smaller depth or just less full).
Yogurt also tends to be the same height, and the same at the top, but smaller circumference at the bottom (ie the angle is sharper).
There was an article about how the primary grocery shopper has a different sense of inflation than people who primarily are involved with buying big ticket items (because electronics, white ware and home goods have gone done in price or increased quality)
One of the few things I’ve appreciated this year with our focus on online grocery ordering + curbside pickup is that the prices are prominently displayed in terms of dollars per ounce. It’s really made me more aware of the changes in packaging / sizing / pricing.
I had the same experience–I was living beyond my means on publishing and non-profit jobs with a heavy student loan load. Now I am debt free and in a better job that allows me to save a lot of what I make. I used to need to track every penny, but now I have buffers (both financial and psychological lol, because I could finally afford therapy) so I try to take a holistic sort of category approach instead. The adjustment took some time and patience.
What tricks do you use to track in a more general way @noodle?
I might be ready to stop tracking at a granular level, but not sure how that would work since I currently use YNAB which forces me to categorize every transaction, which is a similar amount of labor whether I have 5 categories or 15.
Maybe just total income & outflows, and stop categorizing every single transaction?
I’ve been very tempted but scared to pull the plug. I keep hoping to come up with a method that’s a happy medium?
If nothing else, your comment made me dig around in YNAB settings until I found a way to change number format to integers! Now it’s much easier to scan.
@Ferngully I can’t speak for @Noodle But the way I do my “low key” version of tracking is this:
Once a month I go through all my accounts and update a NW tracking sheet I have. It has all my taxable investment details, my IRAs, my checking accounts, etc. I go through everything, pay off my cards, update all the numbers, and plug that month’s net worth into another tab on my spreadsheet which logs NW by month.
This way I:
Have a baseline ‘health’ check up of my finances semi-regularly
Can make sure no fraudulent claims are on my credit cards (I don’t have them on auto pay)
Confirm my checking/savings accounts are where I think they should be and thus keep a rough eye on spending (just gut-checking levels)
Still have the upper stratosphere view of my financial goals via the net worth graph by month.
I don’t pay much attention to the FIRE % stuff. I just put it in there a long time ago and
EDIT:
To clarify, on normal months, this is ALL the tracking I do.
June is a non-normal month to re-check and make sure my gut is still on track.
For a lot of people intense tracking is necessary and super informative and helpful! I’m not slamming tracking. Just that stepping away from it was really helpful to me mentally. I obviously have not fully abandoned spreadsheet love.
I use Mint, so I’ll look at general categories rather than each individual transaction, if that makes sense? For example I noticed our grocery spending is way up, which was partially due to unchecked pandemic spending and partially due to inflation. Also set up alerts to get a text or email if I go over in categories like house stuff and clothing–lets me know to hold off on purchases that aren’t “needs” til the next month.
Ugh. I guess this gets at why I feel like I can’t stop- trying to deal with Husband’s work charges. I guess I could have him send me the reimbursement numbers and I could subtract that from total charges on cards. Hmm.
Does your mint categorize well then??? Mine is a hot GD mess. My hair cut came up as a gas station. Our utilities come up as personal care. Etc. So stupid and tedious, and it’s like Mint cannot learn.
Haha! I do have to do some upkeep, yep. For now, my finances are pretty simple. I don’t own property or vehicles, I don’t have kids, and I work a typical 7-4 job that I don’t have to track expenses for. I imagine adding any of those complicating factors might require a different method in the future!
He often has to spend $1-3k on work stuff in a month though. It’s all reimbursed, but like… hugely variable amounts. Sometimes it’s only like $50 though. But pretty wild numbers.
I wonder if a solution might be to just track delayed. I.e. do the credit cards and all that independently, but then track NW spending on a one-to-two month delay, so by the time you get it all recorded the variability has evened out.
Just spit-balling; I’ve never had to deal with that much swing between incomings/outgoings before!
That’s kinda how stuff ends up now just by virtue of mint taking forever to take transactions off pending sometimes I think the biggest thing is that I want to know what our grocery spending is doing versus household maintenance and projects and stuff. Hmm.
Mint is kind of sounding like more trouble than use right now.
Oh and I’ll check our general prices, I’d bet some stuff has gone up. But this was waaaay out… Turns out Ponder just bought like 3x more of everything than I expected so we have a nice full pantry now.
Could he put all the work stuff on a spectate credit card that you don’t track? If the reimbursements are slower than the credit card cycle then that might not work, but if they’re relatively timely he should be able to pay off the expenses with the reimbursement.
Although I’m seeing that if the reimbursement just comes in a normal paycheck that’s hard to separate out too…
Not really? A lot is from our Amazon account. I mean, he COULD get a company credit card and use the office account but then we wouldn’t get the rewards cash on THOUSANDS of dollars worth of purchases which would be bonkers just for tracking haha. And yes, his manager is a ding dong so it’s usually a 6-8 week delay from spending happening to getting reimbursement money.
I think the biggest thing is that I want to know what our grocery spending is doing versus household maintenance and projects and stuff. Hmm.
so we have a nice full pantry now.