Closing The Purse Strings

Check what you’re spending. It’s very easy to let lots of small purchases add up into significant expenditure. I did this by going back over my PayPal history (as it’s how I do most of my non-essential transactions). It also lets you export a lot of your history to CSV, so you can do some data anlysis on it yourself.

For me, the main culprits were Guitar and Books, which isn’t a surprise. Guitar includes both equipment, books, and learning videos, costing about ~800 in the 2 years up to 2017. Books have come out to about the same, 800-900.

The books cover many categories, and includes both work and pleasure. I’m very willing to spend money to ensure my education stays up to date to keep me relevant in my career. For personal books, it’s often software development, machine learning/AI, history, politics, philosophy (stoicism, mainly, but also buddhism and taoism), and roleplaying rulebooks. This is also now being bolstered with Warhammer40k fiction.

Following this are some subscriptions/services. Netflix, Spotify, Todoist, Evernote, The Economist, Dropbox, Amazon, Twitch.tv, WebFaction.

Many of these services have now been trimmed

• Todoist: Now use a todo.md file in Dropbox.
  • Update 2022-08-27: back to using todoist. Alerts are very useful for freeing up mental energy. Just need to remind myself intermittently to not overcomplicate my system.
• Evernote: Now just use plaintext files in Dropbox
• Netflix: Wasn’t really enjoying any of the content, so just got rid of it
• Webfaction: Now hosted exclusively on github. Ended up spending too much time fiddling with the website, rather than just getting content out there.
• The Economist: Everyone things ‘being informed’ is something to be prized. I disagree. Most media lacks any meaningful follow-on action. It placates you.

With the removal of these services, I’m saving several hundred pounds each year.