A full year, sorted by where it actually went

I said in the risk register piece that roughly 20% of your decisions drive 80% of the outcome, and that housing, transport and how much you earn are the 20% — the rest is mostly noise. I believed that when I wrote it. I hadn't actually checked it against a full year of my own transactions until now.

The noise

Sorted by how often money left my account, three categories dominate: groceries, transport, and eating out. Between them they account for well over half of every transaction I made in a year — hundreds of purchases, each one small. Groceries averaged about £8 a time. Transport, about £14. Eating out, about £11. None of these individually is worth a second thought, and that's rather the point: they're frequent enough to feel significant and small enough to not actually be significant, which is exactly the combination that makes people obsess over the wrong line of the spreadsheet.

The signal

Then there's everything else — housing, one-off shopping, holidays, bills — which shows up far less often but moves far more money each time it does. And underneath all of it sits a much bigger story than any single category: for five months in a row, from May to October, my total monthly spending ran at two to three times what it had been from December through April. Not a gradual creep. A step change, sustained for half a year, that dwarfs every grocery run and coffee combined.

I'm not going to pretend the data tells me why — a chart doesn't know whether that was a house move, a life change, or six months of bad decisions, and I'd rather write honestly about the cause in its own post than bolt on a tidy explanation here just to make this one feel complete. What the chart does tell me, cleanly, is where to look. It's never the groceries.

What actually changes when you check

Nothing about my daily spending needed fixing. The category I check first now is whichever one only shows up a handful of times a year, because that's where a real decision — good or bad — is sitting. The categories that show up every day are the ones I've stopped auditing entirely; a hundred small, sensible purchases were never going to be the problem, and no amount of frowning at the eating-out total was going to move the number that actually mattered.

The 80/20 line from the risk register post survives contact with a real spreadsheet. I just hadn't done the arithmetic before I said it.

Not financial advice — I'm not qualified to give any. Figures above are rounded from my own tracked spending across a year of transactions; I've kept exact totals and account details out of this post deliberately.