I've been keeping a budget / tracking spending in an excel sheet for over a decade now – I know all the rules about keeping paper copies of things, but I'm torn as to if I should start stripping out older entries from the spreadsheet or not?
Do any of you folks find use in looking at personal spending trends more than 10y back? I'm solidly in my career so while that was a different job, it wasn't a different kind of job, just a previous employer; and I'm in the same house, so it feels unnecessary? But at the same time, I'm a bit of a digital hoarder, so as long as the spreadsheet doesn't balk, I don't have a particular reason to drop the older data.
So: do folks find value is tracking spending for significant lengths of time, or is it enough to just have 5 year insights into such things?
At what point do you archive spending tracking / budget info?
byu/ignescentOne inpersonalfinance
Posted by ignescentOne
8 Comments
I don’t see much value in looking back much further than 1-2 years.
10 years ago I was making less than half of what I currently make.
The amounts and percentages I was spending on housing, groceries, transport, and just about everything else are also very different from today.
That information is not useful in guiding my present decisions.
If you want to hang onto it so that you can look back fondly, then no harm to that though.
I keep the previous columns. Each quarter when I add the newest column of data I hide the oldest still visible column.
I agree, unless the spreadsheet complains I see no point in deleting the older information. It also allows for calculations in the future that you haven’t thought of yet.
I have every single transaction dating back to July 2014. I do not look at it. Except maybe to see if I can figure out what the name of that restaurant was that we went to on that trip in mid-October in 2015 (and that’s why I don’t use generic payees even if I think I’ll never go there again).
Presumably you have a digital folder somewhere where you keep important financial info (that is backed up). I would keep a copy of your present spreadsheet in there (archived), with “2015-25” added in the title. Then delete all but the last one or two years from your current spreadsheet, and proceed from there.
It’s nice to keep the old data, but it’s not necessary to keep it “live” in your current spreadsheet.
I only use my old spreadsheets when folks are throwing around “groceries have doubled or tripled since 2019” and I can pull up my old spreadsheet to show they’re up 25%.
I archive in 2 years. That data may be nostalgic to look at later, but I don’t think it ever will be useful for anything
Data storage is cheap. Why delete it? Maybe ignore the data in analysis but why delete a few kbs worth of data? It may never be useful but it doesn’t cost anything and there is no good reason to delete it.
I keep all my old stuff because it’s not onerous to do so (it’s pretty much just one spreadsheet per year) and I have occasionally wanted to remember something and been able to look back (nothing important, but curiosity).
There’s no “value” in saving them longer, but it’s also not costing me anything.