More Budget Fun: Wesabe!

For a long time, I budgeted on spreadsheets. I'd have to enter everything manually (sigh), sort it manually (sigh), and set up all the formulas myself (okay, I think spreadsheet formulas are really cool, so I didn't mind that too much).

Yet I continually thought "oh, if only there was a program that could take the transactions directly from my bank statement and staple-sort them itself!"

Turns out there are a kajillion of those kind of programs. After some research, I went with Wesabe. You upload your bank statement (alternatively, you can choose to give Wesabe your bank passwords and have it do automatic uploads, but I chose the manual upload option, which keeps Wesabe out of my bank account, even though I have to re-upload every week or so to maintain accurate information), and Wesabe sorts your purchases by type and provides all kinds of graphs to illustrate your spending habits.

Now, I know that Wesabe is kindly providing this free service so it can get its grubby little paws on my spending preferences. Probably very useful for Wesabe to know whether or not its users spend more at Walmart or at Meijer, etc., and to know whether they buy gas on weekdays or weekends. However, it's a free service, and somebody's going to get that information anyway, so it might as well be someone who gives me a few really cool graphs in exchange.

With Wesabe, I found out that every month, I spend on average:

$137 on groceries
$70 on gas (this has got to stop)
$130 on utilities
$93 on car insurance
$16 on restaurant food (i.e. anything I don't cook myself)
$6 on entertainment (which is actually the three movies I saw in January totaling $18... no entertainment spending since...)

Oh, and I've spent $392.10 on the DC interview tour, which includes the plane ticket, clothing, and a new pair of shoes.

I am officially tired of being poor.