Do you know how much your pets cost you a month? Every 6 months? A year perhaps?
Recently my bank (RBC) introduced a finance tracker which allows you to categorize and see exactly where you’re spending your money. For kicks, I decided to see how much my pets are costing me (seeing that I just spent $20 on a dog nail trimmer AGAIN!) and the results were somewhat surprising.
I should also say that they are far from the first bank or financial services company that’s offering a personal finance tracker – the most well-known one out there mint.com has for a few years.. the problem is – it’s only available in the US as of right now, which is really sad as it’s a great service from what I understand. Canada has a number of them as well, but they fail in comparison.
Over the course of the last 3 months – I’ve spent over $400 on my pets. Vet Care accumulated $185 of that, Pet Food was $120, and Pet Insurance racked up $80, the nail trimmer I just bought was another $20.
I don’t even think that includes the big bag of dog food I purchased at the silent auction for a charity for $38.
Wow.. that’s a lot of money!! over $100 a month on the hounds! That’s not even counting the over 2K I spent on Hunters surgeries in January and February. It’ll be interesting to see if they keep my transactions prior to February now as they only usually kept the last 3 months or so. I sure hope they do.
They did a great job in designing the program, it takes usually a day or two for your transactions to appear in the program – but once there, you can quickly categorize them into the things that you purchased or other expenses. I do like to see the large amount paid on loans in my past month graph – it’s so nice to know I only have a few months left carrying that around.
What I found interesting were the little things that added up like the pets that I mentioned above. I also categorized my food down to sobeys/shoppers/superstore, etc. I guess it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying dog food or you’re looking for Ferrari parts for your recently broken down car – it all costs money, and if you don’t keep track, the amounts over time can be staggering.
I know that I’ll be using this budget tracker over time to see where my money is really being spent, but I wanted to post this to let you know that pets can be expensive..
Hey Len! I just started using My Finance Tracker too. I categorized my alcohol expenses into “hobbies” – I wish there was a way to put in your own categories. I’ll be doing a post on this when I do my monthly updates on income and expenses, but probably some time in July as I haven’t used it for a full month yet.
The nice folks at RBC were kind enough to shoot me over a powerpoint presentation on the system to use in my blog too.
Do you know if you can get a mobile version of it? I’d like to be able to see my results on my phone too.
Hmm.. that’s a good question.. I don’t believe so, but I haven’t really looked at it..
I think you can define your own Categories.. basically just go into the Categories and there’s a field for Category Nickname .. simply use one that you wouldn’t use (for me one like Taxes, or Education).. and boom.. your new Category.
Pretty handy.