The USS Quad Damage

Yesterday, I thought to check on my finances. Where is my money going, after all? Since most of my purchases are on my credit card, I can quite easily check what's going on. Further, since Virgin conveniently provide csv files for some period of time, It wasn't hard to get at the data.

I basically "slurped" it into SQL. Then I added tagging. Tagging is something I would never have used before, the idea is simple but it never came to me. However, if there's one thing that everything web 2.0 has in common, it's tagging. I think that's what makes most of these sites so good. Anyway, it's very useful to organise data using tagging. I wrote a couple of PHP scripts so I could mess with the data in my browser, and it's been working out rather well.

It seems I'm spending about two thirds of my money on travel, with the other 1/3 on Entertainment (DVDs, eating out, concerts, birthday presents, etc). A little less than half of my money goes into petrol, and about 1/6 goes into the car (hence 2/3 on travel).

I don't have much living expenses because I live with my parents. Petrol is actually relatively cheap, considering I travel 100Km / day. I end up paying about $60 pw, which is about $12 / 100ks at $1.10. It's a lot of money, but I reckon it's about worth it considering the car. It's actually a pretty conservative estimate at $1.10 and considering the fact that it doesn't count the travel on weekends. It's also pretty consistent with my petrol measurements.

Measuring is good, and tags help measuring, so tags are good. I'm going to try and produce bar graphs and shit eventually.