Every year I reflect on how I spent money in the previous year. Previously, I have manually scraped my bank statements and put together a report, but 2025 was interesting because I built a fairly overkill personal finance product to make this report easy to generate for myself.
Because it is really easy, I m going to do a deep dive on how I spent money in 2025. (I was able to put this all together in ~10 mins)
My Financé
Fully featured sandbox to explore: https://demo.myfinancereport.com...
I use the tool in 2 ways:
1. I look at how I'm spending my money.
Duh, but most people probably can't tell you how much they spend on groceries per month, or how much they need to make per year to break even. I built the tool to make answering these questions trivial (even across multiple accounts).
my actual grocery spend:
2. I review my net worth. I used visit all my accounts once a month, write down their balance and drop it into a google sheet. Getting this 'for free' saves me about 15 minutes per month.
not my actual account balances :)
It's not free to use ($70 / year), though you can try it for 7 days to make sure it actually works with your accounts and things like that. We use Plaid for handling the connections to accounts.
One nice side effect is that I almost never have to log into my actual bank account and get served "ads" and "offers" from the people who already make money from me...
I'd love to hear any feedback!