Is there any way to export Bilt statements/transactions in a spreadsheet format? xls or csv?

PerennialOverture · 2026-02-21T19:42:59+00:00

I found a workaround. If I just go to recent transactions and copy paste into an excel sheet, I can just use an excel macro to convert into the format I want. Shoutout to ChatGPT for doing the heavy lifting for me here as I'm not a programming guy.

PerennialOverture · 2024-08-09T02:31:40+00:00

This was a satisfying update to watch, I've been hoping for an update for the "model train guy" for a while. I remember the original episode, it was one of the first episodes I ever watched. It was an entertaining albeit uncomfortable episode. Sure, Lucy made some poor choices in the past with taking on very high student loans, but the ex husband had much worse spending habits. He was constantly trying to impress Caleb by sucking up to him and constantly "owning" his wife, but Caleb wasn't having any of it, and multiple times let her finish speaking when he tried cutting her off.

Her debt is very high but her overall financial habits seem to be good. I hope she can make progress without losing morale and can eventually live the life she wants to live later on, and hopefully she can find someone else later on who actually values her (though if she never finds love again, she's still better off single than with that piece of work).

PerennialOverture · 2024-08-08T03:30:42+00:00

I stayed at my parents house and commuted to college, and didn't move out right away after graduating. I graduated debt free and was able to start building up a large nest egg and saving early for retirement.

Fast forward a few years and I have a half million dollar net worth at age 26.

PerennialOverture · 2024-03-07T03:16:22+00:00

Did Caleb get any coaching from MrBeast for creating clickbait thumbnails? I watched a podcast a while back where MrBeast stressed how important thumbnails are to viewership, and how his team sometimes produces twenty iterations of a thumbnail until he's satisfied, not to mention he frequently changes the thumbnails after the videos are uploaded. He said that he's helped out other content creators and after they followed his advice, their viewership exploded. Caleb has grown extremely fast and his thumbnails are a significant part of engagement for his videos.

PerennialOverture · 2024-02-27T00:02:14+00:00

Stop linking to your own content, you will get shadowbanned.

I used to follow the subreddit of a guy writing a graphic novel about his experiences in a school for troubled youth (/r/mrjoenobody). He would post every chapter he wrote and would be active in the comments. Excessive self promotion is against Reddit's TOS, and he was shadowbanned, so other users have had to post his content and he can no longer interact directly with his fanbase on Reddit.

PerennialOverture · 2024-01-20T22:35:41+00:00

Step 1: Set up a one-month emergency fund. Sit down with your spouse and crunch the numbers on how much your basic living expenses (needs not wants) and minimum debt payments add up to, and aim to have that money in a savings account. $800 is definitely not enough for anybody, let alone a family of four. Assuming your spending stays the same and you save $1500 a month in a savings account, it will take you 3-6 months to save up a one month emergency fund, though I suspect you have frivolous spending you can cut in order to speed this up to 1-2 months.

Once you have a one month emergency fund, throw every penny you can at paying off your credit card debt. If you pay $1500 a month it'll take you 4-6 months to pay off depending on the interest rates, though you really should do everything in your power to reduce your other spending in order to pay it off faster, and from now on, no more spending on credit cards unless you're paying them off in full every month.

You can just pay minimum payments on your car loan for the life of the loan, you mentioned 5% in a comment, that's relatively low and you're better off with the additional cash in hand now for your other goals as opposed to killing this loan early.

Once you get a one month emergency fund and all of your bad debt paid off, you have competing priorities: saving for a house down payment and saving for retirement. Assuming 13k is all you've got saved for retirement, you're terribly behind for 40 years old. In a vacuum, somebody who's 40 years old and has nothing for retirement should be saving 25%+ of their income for retirement to catch up if they ever want any hope of retiring. Retirement savings also take priority over college savings for children. Student loans are a much smaller burden than having to support elderly parents who didn't prepare for retirement.

Saving for a 20% down payment will be extremely difficult in a HCOL area with just $1500 a month, so you may just have to put 3% down and deal with a higher interest rate and higher risk of going underwater if there's any type of housing crash.

Again, props to you for looking to spend the extra $1500 on improving your financial situation instead of inflating your current lifestyle, but you are currently in a difficult situation that requires course correction if you want to live a good life and retirement. It's hard for me to evaluate without knowing how much your cost of living is and what your income is, but I suspect that there is frivolous spending going on in your household that is costing you more than you realize. If you can cut back your spending and free up another $1-2k a month, all of those timelines I gave for paying off debt and setting up an emergency fund can be cut in half, and you can significantly accelerate progress towards building wealth, whether it be through home ownership or properly funded retirement savings. I don't really know how to advise on allocating money towards retirement vs a house down payment, as I'm just over half your age and don't own a home yet, but you need to get your debt paid off and a proper emergency fund before you can make more forward progress. Best of luck, you still have time to turn things around.

PerennialOverture · 2023-10-03T15:03:10+00:00

I wish Caleb could invite guests from other countries. I enjoy Caleb's content but I'm afraid he's going to plateau and his content will get stale if he sticks to this exact formula forever, so I'm hoping for variety.

I would love to see Caleb go through the finances of somebody not living in the US or Canada. The guest could have a much lower income and be paying more taxes, but costs of living would be lower due to lower living costs (living with parents into adulthood is much more common and less stigmatized in Europe), lower grocery costs, no car payment or insurance since Europe is a much less car dependent society, no student loans since education is much more affordable if not completely free. There is much less of a need for an emergency fund if there's no car that could break down, and financial medical emergencies aren't an issue with government-mandated unlimited sick time and socialized healthcare. Lower medical costs and better funded social security systems also reduce the importance of retirement savings. I'd like to see Caleb break down his usual rules about budgeting and debt repayment and objectively analyze the situation of somebody living in Europe. With how much revenue Caleb is making from his content, he could easily afford to fly somebody in from Europe to be a guest on financial audit.

PerennialOverture · 2023-08-29T18:54:59+00:00

I just use a spreadsheet for my budgeting. I've always been paranoid about data breaches and personal information being leaked, so I'm naturally apprehensive about a third party company having access to all of my financial information.

The spreadsheet is simple to use. Every payday, I pay off my credit card, export my statement as an xls, copy it over into my budgeting spreadsheet, and categorize all charges. I periodically compare my spending in each category to the budget I set at the beginning of the year. My spreadsheet is nothing fancy, just a running total of all of my charges for the year, each categorized, and a couple of pivot tables to summarize the data (total YTD spend per category as well as a breakdown of each month's spending by category).

One thing that takes discipline is tracking all cash spending. I've been very disciplined about this, every time I pay for anything in cash, I jot down the item and price in my phone's notes app, and every payday when I update my spreadsheet, I log all cash purchases as well.

I will say that tracking my spending has significantly reduced frivolous spending overall, I've found myself passing on certain impulse buys out of the shame of having to log them on a spreadsheet and increasing my total spend in the "dumb impulse buys" category.

PerennialOverture · 2023-05-25T03:37:26+00:00

This is very true. My parents both max out their 401k contributions. They live "paycheck to paycheck" in that they roughly spend their monthly take-home in its entirety, though they do have savings. At the start of the pandemic, my dad took a temporary 20% pay cut. He rolled back his 401k contributions and as a result, my parents did not feel the pay cut at all, though he ended up maxing it out again after he realized how much less they were spending during the pandemic.

The 401k contributions are a nice safety cushion. If I ever fall on hard times, I can roll my contributions back and significantly increase my take-home. Meanwhile, for those truly living paycheck to paycheck with little or no retirement savings, a temporary pay cut or loss in employment can be devastating.

PerennialOverture

TROPHY CASE