Daily Ledger

[dancerjodi]

I enjoy playing with spreadsheets. This is one of the reasons I was able to keep track of our finances easily when we were trying to pay down debt (with some help from a friend with setting up a good budget).

From time to time I get lax with this, but then I always come back. I read a blog post today from a woman who found an old relative's cash log up in an attic somewhere, documenting their spending habits in the 1940s. It was a neat look at what things cost in days of old, how simple a normal family's consumer habits were, and a bit at the lifestyle that this family had in the purchases they were making.

I constantly think when tracking our own finances that they are quite complicated, and not as frugal as I'd like. I wonder what someone 50 years from now would think about my life, looking at it.

Having interests in history and sociology and ancestry research, I think sometimes of what I should perhaps purposefully leave behind for generations later to learn from, and it is this kind of thing that I consider when tracking things. Paper is a nice medium for this, but digital is so much portable, and shareable in other ways. Things to ponder.

Either way, now that we're back from our second spring trip, I'm excited about getting back to "normal" life and getting a handle again on where we are spending our cash.

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

The downside of digital is format drift - while your grandkids are quite likely to still be able to read something printed on paper, a digital version might become inaccessible (could you get data off a 5 1/4" floppy? That's little more than a decade old).