Where Does All Your Money Actually Go?
Episode notes
I give myself an unlimited budget for books. I also track basically every dollar my wife and I spend. Those two things sound like a contradiction, but they're actually the whole point.
This is how we decide what to spend on without an ounce of guilt, and what to cut without feeling deprived. Turns out "budgeting" done right feels less like punishment and more like permission.
I'm no financial advisor, just someone who loves this stuff enough to do a whole solo episode on it. This is exactly what works for us.
What you'll take away:
- The "spend ruthlessly, cut ruthlessly" rule that flips budgeting from restriction into permission
- Why you literally cannot fix your spending until you can see all of it in one place
- The forgotten subscription hiding in your statements right now (mine was $20 a month)
Chapters:
00:00 Cold open
00:30 The paycheck-to-paycheck stat that includes high earners
02:00 Monarch: putting every account in one dashboard
04:30 Spend ruthlessly on what you value (and my book budget)
06:30 Housing, childcare, and the expenses you can't change
07:30 The counterintuitive grocery move
08:00 Using AI to audit your spending
09:00 What's your biggest line item? (drop a comment)
🔗 Links mentioned:
- Monarch Money
- I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
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Transcript
Transcribed from the recording and lightly formatted for reading. Nothing has been reworded, so the occasional mis-hearing is left as spoken.
Jeff Albaum
What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Curiosity Class. Today we're gonna be talking about one of my favorite topics of all time, personal finance. for those that talk me on a regular basis, that is a thing I love talking about. I could talk about it for hours. so I will try to do it in a more succinct way today. But I wanted to talk about a couple high-level topics and then some tactical, you know, pieces of software that I use to help out, you know, with doing personal finance on a day-to-day basis. So
There's a cr pretty crazy statistic that something like fifty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So that is at the end of the month there's no money left over. And the interesting part of this is you can look at it as like, yeah, well, there's a lot of people who don't make a lot of money. That's that's true. but this also skews to high income earners, right? So there's this phenomenon where people make a ton of money but spend just as much, if not more, money. So it's not
necessarily just an income related thing. Like I don't think the distribution is skewed towards low income earners. It's I think it's across the board. in fact there's many high income earners that spend a lot of money. and so they are also living paycheck to paycheck. Right. So this is a very interesting phenomenon and something that I find really fascinating. and so yeah, I just kind of wanted to break down a couple elements of personal finance and like what what that means and how I think about it and and et cetera. So
Kind of at a high level. Again, it sounds it sounds simple, but spend less than you earn, right? So whatever you earn, spend less than that. Okay, cool. Simple, not easy, right? There's a lot of a lot of things in finance is very simple, but not necessarily easy. So you know, that could look very different for different people, but there's a lot of differentiators between like, okay, how what do you spend money on? Where does your money go, et cetera? Like I know for my wife and I, sometimes, some months we're like,
Shoot, where did the money go? Like we, you know, we get paid into one account and then we pay all off all of our credit cards and rent and groceries and stuff. And you're like, there's actually not a lot left over, or sometimes there's none left over. and so how can we increase savings? How can we save more? How can we invest more? How can we, you know, be a little bit better? And so the system that works for us that that we really like is we use a company called Monarch, Monarch Money. I think the I'll put the URL in the description.
But it's this really cool piece of software. And they're they're not a sponsor yet. so this is I'm just a very happy customer. But it's really cool. You can connect all of your accounts. So think, you know, if you have multiple credit cards, you can link your credit cards to Monarch. You can link your bank accounts, and you can link any other debts that you have. So your mortgage, your student loan debt, your like whatever.
Well, anything that you pay online, you can link via Monarch. and it consolidates everything into one dashboard that's pretty user and user friendly. So you can look at all of your transactions across all of your credit cards and so and then you can categorize them. So it has it has some AI features that help to auto-categorize and it learns over time. So if it sees like you know, H E B, it knows that that's groceries, for example.
And so you can go in and change that. It's all customizable. But it's really cool because you can go in and and see on a very granular level how much money am I spending on groceries, housing, transportation, gas, insert other category here and you can make up your own. and so it's really, really helpful because you can see very clearly how much you're getting in income and in your, you know, your paycheck. So also your paychecks hit, right? So as your paychecks come in, that's considered income and then all the
Show full transcript
Jeff Albaum
Transactions are your all your other expenses are expenses, and you can see what's left over. and so it's really, really cool because it gives you different visual graphs and bar graphs. And you can see, like, okay, on a on a monthly basis, how do we do? On a quarterly basis, how do we do on a yearly basis? How do we do? and it's really, really cool to like I'm I'm a very visual person. So I like seeing the the different charts and graphs and stuff like that. So we can see, like, like how are we doing each month, right?
and so the other thing that I really like about it is it gives you a like we've made decisions based on our spending of like we want to spend more in certain areas and less in other areas. And it's hard to know exactly what you're spending money on until you see where all your money is coming and going, right? So I'm trying to think of an example. Like I I love this idea of if you list out your top values that you think.
Your spending should reflect that. I think Ramit Sedi said this in I Will Teach You to Be Rich. His kind of whole thing is like, I want to ruthlessly eliminate things that don't give me value and ruthlessly spend money on things that do give me value. Right. So like for me, I think I've talked about this before, but I have an unlimited budget for books. Like there's there's no there's never a time if someone recommends a book, I I buy it, right? and so
To me, it feels a little frivolous sometimes because I'm like, ooh, like, I don't know, like I'm spending a lot of money. I could get it from the library, et cetera. and those are all true. Like I I could get them from the library and I I probably should do that more. But at the end of the the day, it's actually I don't spend that much money on books, but it's just like I have this, I give myself permission to spend money on books, right? So anytime someone recommends a book, I usually buy it. if it's someone that, you know, that I that I trust their opinion and it sounds interesting, and I think I'll actually read it.
but so it's really cool to see, like, okay, cool. And I put that under education. We have an education expense on Monarch or education category, excuse me, on Monarch. So every time we buy a book, I put that as an education category. It doesn't end up being that much, right? It's maybe twenty dollars a month. I don't buy that many books. Maybe it's a book a month, right? Call it 20 bucks, 30 bucks a month. but it's interesting to see like how much money are we spending on education, right? Versus like for us, housing and childcare are our two biggest expenses.
And I think across the US, that's very typical. I think housing, transportation, and childcare are the three, maybe food are the three or four biggest expenses and biggest line items for most households. So, you know, housing, we can we can do something about that because we, you know, we rent and we actually we choose to rent. and we could move to a cheaper place if we wanted to, but we've decided that for where we are at stage of life, et cetera, it it makes sense. So we can't
for at least for the term of our lease, we cannot change our rent. our childcare also it's tough to change. Like it either it's it's binary. You either you pay it or you don't. And if you don't, then one of you needs to stay home and that needs to do other math to figure out like if one income makes sense and if you're gonna have more income covered from the one person staying home versus not. So and also like the emotional component like is did you want to stay does one person want to stay home? Does one person not want stay home? So for for us we made the decision to send our our
child to day care. And so that's also we can't change that expense. food, we have a little bit of leeway. And so we've we've played around like, okay, if we go grocery shopping less often, but spend more per time, it actually results in a lower monthly cost of going to the store, which is a bit counterintuitive because you're like, but you're spending more each time. But for us, like we would go to the store and every time we would spend like 50 bucks. Right. And so if we're going every couple days, that adds up quicker than spending, you know,
$200 once a week. Right. So it's really cool to kind of see these. And we wouldn't have known this if it weren't for Monarch, because we can go in and see, where do these where where do these expenses come from? Right. it's also really fun. And I think as of to as of right now, August 2026, their it's called MCP. It's a way to connect different softwares to different AI, like Chat GPT or Claude. So I think as of right now, their MCP connection is actually down. They're working on it right now.
but you can take screenshots of Monarch and plug it into Claude or ChatGPT or Perplexy, whatever you use, and help you come up with a budget. Like, like, hey, help me figure out what I can eliminate. and so we did this last week. and Claude found a bunch of subscriptions that I didn't even know I had. And I'm pretty, pretty tight about like what I have a subscription to, but it was like a subscription within Amazon. It was like the
You know, in Prime Video, you can see you can add on like the HBO or whatever. I did that once for a free trial and I forgot to cancel. And so it wasn't showing up anywhere, or I wasn't seeing it show up anywhere. And Claude found it and was like, Are you do you need that? And I was like, I I don't need that. No, it's like 20 bucks every month. so it's yeah, it's really fun to see and it's really cool to see like what you actually spend money on besides your let's call it necessities, right? Your your cost of living, so to speak.
and so it's really fun to think about like, okay, what do we want to spend money on? What do we ruthlessly want to spend money on? If it's education, if it's fitness, if it's travel, like what are the things versus what are the things we want to ruthlessly eliminate? Right. So we tend not to eat out that much. we're not huge foodies, we enjoy restaurants, but we're like, man, like gotta try this new restaurant. So for us, it's not an intentional like we ruthlessly don't eat out, but it's like we prefer to cook and it's I don't know, it's we we like it more. So
Our our restaurant budget is quite low compared to I think most couples in you know our age. so we've kind of chosen to cut out more in in restaurants and we've we spend more on groceries and fitness and those types of things and travel. Travel is a huge one for us. so yeah, that I would definitely recommend everyone check out Monarch, play around with it. I think you get a free couple days if you want to just try it out and connect a couple bank accounts and you know see how you like it.
if anyone has any questions or wants to chat more about personal finance, again, I love, love, love this stuff. and I we can talk each other's ears off about it. So anyone has any questions, drop them down. I'm curious what everyone's beside yeah, I'm curious what everyone's highest line item expenses are every month. Like how much people are paying for, you know, their house, their rent, their mortgage, whatever. Like I love, I love learning that. So if you're comfortable, drop me a comment with what you're paying, what your biggest expense is, and I will see everybody next week. Bye, everybody.