A very fun exercise is to export all your bank accounts (as CSV) both personal and business and stock broker And dump it all into Claude Code and ask it to make a little dashboard showing your spending It's hard to know how much you actually spend over lots of accounts so this can help you understand that You'll spend some time merging transactions (like company names change or their statement label changes), and categorizing, you can just do this by talking to Claude Code btw very easy, I also hooked it up to @xai Grok so it can use that to categorize mass transactions (very cheap) The best part isn't the dashboard it makes but that once you have all the data collected, you can ask Claude Code lots of questions directly about your finances and learn stuff, like I learned: - I was paying for some subscriptions for 2 years I forgot about ($$$) - My US stocks charge me withholding tax (30%) on dividends, which I knew but never realized how much $$$ it was (which is why non-US citizens should buy UCITS ETFs not US stocks!) - My pool remodeling was ridiculously expensive compared to the rest of the home remodeling and we got fleeced hard (that's life!), then the pool company caused a €9000 water leak that they won't pay (funny) - I spent $400K on domains over the years, I should probably stop spending money on them, it's an addiction @marckohlbrugge gave me and it's way more than my gf's shopping - My biggest monthly cost by far is AI at about $24K/month in GPU costs for Photo AI, but that's just how it is, I already got the cheapest rates possible, AI is pricey! - My 2nd biggest cost is taxes, who would have thought??? - Travel is quite expensive, flying business class, getting nice hotels and regularly traveling adds up a lot! - My business costs without AI (!) are extremely low, about $5K/month on revenue which is about 98% profit margin (!), with AI it goes up to $28K/mo or about 86% profit margin (still good!) - Lawyers become quite an expense in this part of my life, you buy a house you pay a lawyer and notary, you register trademarks for your business you pay a lawyer, but they're a great thing to spend money on I think because they protect you from losing much more money than they cost! - I started spending much more money since 2022 because of AI costs but also making much more money because of AI, so it's good - My spending has remained remarkably consistent as a percentage of my net worth at "just" 5%/year, which is close to FIRE which is always my goal (don't spend over 3%/year of your net worth), in my case it's different cause I actually have company income, so it's more of a fun goal to be responsible with my money - Around 2024 my life definitely switched from barely spending money and living as a digital nomad to buying a house and spending on that a lot, I knew a house was a money pit, but it's also a nice money pit and it helps me sleep better (great AC and bedroom), live healthier (home gym), and work better (coworking), so it's worth it - I barely have any personal subscriptions except Netflix, YouTube and Spotify, I asked it to built a "Recurring subscriptions" box too so I can see what subs I have and cancel them Try it!