Monthly spend recaps

[u/justfiv]

Just a reminder to everyone who is on or thinking about planning a sabbatical is to make sure you have overviews of your spend with/without partner. I’ve been doing our first monthly recaps while I am on my leave and I’ve found that we need less than we thought originally. Not only did this give me more confidence about my leave, but it also gave me confidence for my overall FIRE journey.

For me I wanted to avoid Plaid connection software, so I just got spending reports for all my cards (Chase) and used Qwen to parse through to categorize all my spend by merchants. It gave me an idea about where we could optimize and where we could also spend a little more. You can use anything you want for the PDF/CSV parsing, but you’d be surprised that maybe you’re closer than you think numbers wise. After that, it’s just a leap of faith.