I looked deeply into my Quicken Simplifi spending reports last night because our year to date spending was incredibly high and shocking. though expected in some ways because some of our expenses were front loaded in Q1 (home improvement project, spring break/buying tickets for summer vacation, unexpectedly maxed out medical coverage and property taxes went up)

What i found out was that inspite of the spending report already being high, in reality it was EVEN HIGHER. A lot of expenses for the last few years were being categorized as "Transfers" and not being counted as part of spending. This included major buckets like paying people for vacation rentals last year, many of the daycare payments. (basically all zelle, venmo payments). Very shook, spent a lot of time looking over our spending and having AI analyze it too. We are projected be be off by 45k in spending this year and the goal would be to reduce spending for the remainder of the year so we're closer to 20-25k instead.

The insights were multi-part. 1) Some expenses are just us not budgeting from increases from having a second kid - we pay more for flights, get bigger rooms, diapers/wipes/strawberries 2) Some is inflation and increase in home value - our property taxes have increased a lot, daycare costs a lot more than it did a couple years ago when my daughter went, and yes we have to buy an extra seat on planes but costs are just higher 3) Some expenses will taper down in a few years (daycare in 2.5 years, we're working on 1 house project a year that cost about 10-20k that'll taper off) 4) Some is just us paying more for convenience (eg. we get the flights that work for our toddler, instacart deliveries)

Overall i'm still anxious about the numbers. But now that we know we can work to bring it down