As we rang in the New Year (well we did it over a month ago but still), I’ve been working on my 2023 spend recap. A tradition I started in 2021 and am trying to keep alive, below will be a discussion of how my spend of the year worked out in terms of categories, total spend, cash back (rough estimate but mostly accurate), SUBs (excluding bank accounts) and a comparison to how this year stacked up to years past

If you haven’t read my 2022 Spending Recap, that can be found here

2022 Spending Recap: I Spent Too Much Money

Disclaimer: I find being transparent about finances to be valuable so these are my actual metrics. I am not doing this to brag in any way. I just hope that my insights can somehow help other and help myself be smarter about my money

The Totals

2023 Spending Recap Spreadsheet

2022 Spending Recap Spreadsheet

2021 Spending Recap Spreadsheet

As I said last year, if all you care about is the raw numbers, you can stop reading. The rest of this document will go into a breakdown of each category, some notes I have about each and finally a comparison to how this year stacked up against last year

Year	Total CC Spend	YOY	Total After All Deductions	YOY
2023	$79,228.46	0.45%	$84,689.10	3.52%
2022	$78,870.91	–	$81,812.95	–

It is honestly a great feeling knowing that I generally am spending the same year over year. My income has gone up more than 3.52% in that time as well

Asterisks

Wanted to give some asterisks behind this data before we dive in

Cash Back is Estimated

Most of my banks issue some form of year end summary but none of them offer the same for cash back. To calculate cash back, I do rough estimates based on. categories and what I use the cards for. For example, I assume a flat 5% for cards like the Citi Custom Cash and Chase Freedom/Flex because I always optimize my spend to only be on these cards when they will earn 5%. Some cards are accurate like all of my BofA cards (earning 4.5% on everything through Online Shopping & Curve or 2.25% straight cash back), Atlantic Federal Credit Union (5% up to $200/m), Albert (manually tracked) and others

Lots of Spend Reimbursed

You will notice Net Venmo Transactions (NVT) as a line item. This is spend I made but was reimbursed from friends/family for. Most of these transactions, I retain the cash back but sometimes on larger purchases I will send them a cut/all of it. This cash back is still counted in my totals even though I may have paid it off

MCC Dependancy

All of these categories are taken from MCCs from the transactions. These can not only be wrong but can vary from network. I know that some automotive spend leaked into other categories but eeteeswhateetees

Spend by Category

Dining

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$13,524.65	17.07%	+18.43%
2022	$11,419.88	14.48%	–

Dining includes things like restaurants, fast food, bars and other specialty food restaurants. This is a slight uptick from last year by a magnitude of 2.45% or an increase of 18.43% YOY. I attribute this to going into office more (I never bring lunch). This can also include Venmo transactions. Most of the reimbursements I receive are usually for dining purchases, but this was also true for last year so not much of an explanation

Through the advent of having Curve, I started putting Dining purchases on my Cardless Boston Celtics card for 4% as opposed to my BofA Customized Cash card for 4.5% as I was using that card to get 4.5% on all spend and figured the 0.5% difference was negligible. Looking back, I missed out on ~$70 here with that 0.5% which I am fine with

Minimal spend went on Albert for their occasional 10%-20% cash back offers, up to $5 each

Entertainment

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$3,804.14	4.80%	-40.97%
2022	$6,444.68	8.17%	–

Thinning about how many concert venues and sporting events I went to this year this is a surprising downturn in spend. I wouldn’t have guessed I spent 40% less this year but numbers don’t lie

This includes things like sporting events, concert tickets, movie tickets etc. Previously this mostly went on my BofA Customized Cash set to online shopping for 4.5%, but has partially moved to one of my two Citi Custom Cash cards for 5%

Gas

Total: $2,601.55, 3.28% of total

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$2,601.55	3.28%	15.45%
2022	$2,253.31	2.86%	–

This year came the quasi return to office and me traveling home more frequently to visit family. Also I think gas prices in general went up? Who knows anymore

Unsurprisingly most of this spend went on my grandfathered 5% Ducks Unlimited card. Some spend went to Albert because of their occasional 10% off Shell up to $5 off. I now have the Redstone FCU Visa Signature which also earns 5% on gas but the Ducks card remains in my car at all times so I will still use that for gas

Curve made it easy to put ~20% of my gas spend on my Albert card for 10% off at Shell (in addition to the Fuel Rewards savings). That amounted to an extra $25 for my troubles. Thinking about it, that’s a lot of effort for $25…

Grocery

Total: $4,732.11, 5.97% of total

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$4,732.11	5.97%	115.67%
2022	$2,194.17	2.78%	–

This change was quite shocking. In 2022 I attributed my lack of spend to MealKits but I continued those albeit less aggressively. Only spending habits I can think of that might have caused this would be choosing higher quality groceries and shopping at WholeFoods more frequently

I also previously did not have a card for this category but now use one of my Citi Custom Cash cards for 5% up to $500/m and continue to hurt Albert for 20% off at WholeFoods

Health

Total: $ 2,144.42, 1.30% of total

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$2,144.42	2.71%	109.11%
2022	$1,025.48	1.30%	–

Went to the ER and got a mouth guard this year which were not cheap. Luckily Ness gave me 5% on these (and Albert for 15%) but Ness didn’t fully pay our (pending an FDIC complaint). I still love CVS CarePass now called ExtraCare+

Merchandise

Category	Spend	% Of Total
General Merchandise	$15,998.22	20.19%
Home Improvement	$646.48	0.82%
Costco	$4,148.33	5.24%

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$20,793.03	26.18%	-41.69%
2022	$27,436.72	34.70%	–

This category in the past was my biggest gripe with my tracker. Banks do not divide out the Merchandise category well and includes things like furniture, clothing, electronics, Costco, some subscription services etc. This year I went though and added Wholesale and Home Improvement to this category to make it more granular. For consistencies sake I kept the first table to be able to compare YOY

I am happy to say this category went down a whole lot. I think a lot of that spend was correctly attributed last year to furnishing a new apartment but I now frivolously spend way too much on vinyl records. I should stop but….they’re cool!

Other

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$4,925.76	6.22%	134.40%
2022	$2,101.47	2.66%	–

These are purchases that did not fall under any other category. This includes things like bank account funding (included to track cash back but removed via the Bank Account Funding BAF line item) which made up $3,750.00 of this category this year

Services

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$6,158.47	6.22%	20.71%
2022	$5,101.70	6.47%	–

This includes tax payments which amounted to almost $3k. Churning bank account SUBs are expensive!

Travel

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$13,615.22	17.18%	48.10%
2022	$9,193.22	11.66%	–

This year I went to Europe on vacation and flew to my parents place a few times. Most of it was purchased on my Venture X and a lot of it was negated from NVTs since I was paid back for our housing and flights, which earned 5-10% cash back. I also used Juno to buy a few Airbnbs to get 10% cash back and was reimbursed for much of it. My Cardless card earns 7% on rideshare which is nice too

Utilities

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$1,993.85	2.52%	26.63%
2022	$1,574.50	2.00%	–

I moved out of a poorly insulated mill building to an equally poorly insulated duplex with gas heat and wall unit AC. Needless to say, I don’t use either often due to their expense and try to rely on fans/clothes to stay cool/warm. I am happy to see the % of total remaining around the same

Automotive

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$87.77	0.11%	-97.15%
2022	$3,076.91	3.90%	–

I remember calling this out as something to keep my eye on and on paper it looks like I had no spend this year! I think what is actually going on here is MCC misalignment as I probably spend ~$2000 this year on a new drive shaft and standard maintenance

Memberships

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$ 1,062.60	1.34%	-14.89%
2022	$1,248.45	1.58%	–

This is a carve out from entertainment as these are solely gym memberships. I am an avid rock climber and have a membership to both a climbing gym and a normal gym. It is not a cheap hobby (which I fund with churning I guess). Not sure how I managed to shave off some spend, maybe just from buying less day passes

Untracked Spend

Year	Spend	% Of Total	YOY
2023	$ 3,784.89	4.78%	-25.79%
2022	$5,100.13	6.47%	–

Again not an ideal category, but I am very happy it shrunk! Some of the manual calculation was too much so I just did the totals for them. Like for my AFCU card, I always hit my max of $200 spend for 5% back per month and I didn’t bother getting the categorical breakdown for it

Takeaways

It is kind of crazy to see how much I spend in a year. I do want to say that every year I am maxing out my 401k, IRA and HSA so it’s not like my net worth is not growing. As a matter of fact, that is something I track on a monthly basis and will include some screenshots of those graphs for those interested

I like to think of myself as financially savvy – I know how much I make, spend, save etc. I think I am in a great financial position but always looking to improve wherever I can and spending less is probably one of those areas

Graphs

Final Notes

I hope you find this interesting! If you have any advice on how I can make this better or want more info on my spreadsheets just reach out! I will leave you with my final Churning totals for 2023 and years past. Thank you for reading and your support, it means the world ❤

Below is taken from my original post in 2022 but I felt it was worth adding here again

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Spaghetti Soup

What exactly is that bottom line? That is Total Spend with Rent – Total Cash Back – Sign up Bonuses – Rent Cash Back – Net Venmo Transactions – Shopping Portal Cash Back. This gives us our Non-Manufactured Spend (NonMST) total, which is how much I actually spent out of pocket for 2022: $81,811.95

The blended cash back is my total cash back divided by total spend which is 5.36%. Blended Cash Back + Sign up Bonuses gives me my total cash back with SUBs which is 6.89%.

The Tracker

This is my third edition of the tracker. The first one was much more rudimentary. The second one was very similar to this years but had estimates for CC rewards tracking. For 2022 I went through each card and calculated the cash back I earned for each of the categories.

Getting Spend Totals

To populate the tracker, some of it is done by hand but most of it is pulled from the CC companies. In my experience, banks handle end of year spend summaries in three different ways

1. Downloadable Transactions Spreadsheet: Banks like Chase, Citi and Elan allow you to download csv’s of your transactions for the entire year. These are the easiest and most manipulatable as they are already in a spreadsheet and contain merchant categories on each entry. This way I can do some sheets magic to group by matching category and add up my spend for that category
2. PDF Year End Summary: Banks like Bank of America, Capital One, FNBO and Discover issue a Year End Summary in the form of a PDF. This is the second best way for me to get this data. I can’t just copy-paste it into my spreadsheet but I can copy over how they divided up my spend into categories and try to match it to the other banks categories
3. Manual Aggregation: Smaller banks like Albert, Venmo (P2P not card), Oxygen, Cardless and Atlantic Federal Credit Union (AFCU) do not offer either of the above two options. This requires me to go through all of my statements for them and manually account for all of my spend, what category it was in and how much cash back I earned on them. This is mostly a labor of love

Other Values

After completing all of the CC tracking, the total spend number was honestly surprising. I then went into thinking of how this number could artificially inflated. This is why I added my Net Venmo Transactions (NVTs). This is the total amount of money I received from friends and family repaying me for things I purchased for/with them on my cards. I have additional money I got via Zelle but I could not find an easy way to gather that data so I just left it

Rent cash back is from Enzo’s $20/m on my rent payments. I also got into cashback portals, mainly MealKit purchase, which you can read a bit more about here