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Comment by symbogra | Hacker News Reader

I used to do this during my first real job and was tracking every sandwich I bought, then one of the senior engineers told me to stop wasting time with it and make more money, and then I was enlightened.

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Here's another enlightenment for you:

Tracking expenses doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes per day, if you do it daily. With the correct workflow, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes per month. There are even apps that would do that for you without any effort, though not so perfectly as fine tuned apps.

And now, the enlightenment part: how is expense tracking preventing you from making more money than visiting hecker news, reddit, social media, listening to the radio, watching TV, reading the news, or a million other things? Do you really spend all your waking hours earning more money so tracking expenses for a few minutes would make you make less?

This begs the question though, of why individuals still need to do this like a 17th century clerk, when it costs their counterparties fractions of a man-second. Imagine if their was a law which said, every business that takes a credit card has to supply the consumer with the data in standard, machine-processable format (ie not pdf) via their credit account (IE, not making obtaining their email address a condition).

Or you could parse PDFs and give them an email address. If you want to live like a 17th century clerk because of rules you've made up in your own head that you must follow like an equally outdated religion where the Sun rotates around the Earth, I'm sorry, but that really seems like it's on you. Personally I'd rather join the modern era and not do that, but to each their own.

And then you get married and have kids and wonder why you have trouble paying the bills despite having a household income in the top 5%.

Then you discover that you really do need to know how much you are spending on sandwiches.

I went through this a bunch of times. Always hoping for an obvious smoking gun expense I could just cut. It always was many little things adding up.

If your income is in the top 5% and you struggle paying bills, it's nearly always an issue with to much of your money stuck in mandatory expense: you are over mortgaged, or have to many car loans, or pay too much for the kids schools.

Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard but small expenses are rarely the root cause.

I think you underestimate the amounts some people spend on things like clothing, coffee, going out to eat and other stuff you wouldn't even think about

Top 5% earner, we are talking at least 350000$ a year. That's a lot of coffee.

No one in this thread is saying coffee is the reason. They're saying the little things add up. Coffee alone isn't a lot. Eating out alone isn't a lot. A cozy warm temperature in the house in a cold climate isn't a lot.

Adding all of it together is too much. So you set the thermostat lower by 3 degrees. Pack lunches two to three days a week and cut down the coffee a certain percentage etc.

Cutting any one thing out altogether will significantly reduce quality of life and won't get you there financially. Cutting back a bunch on each category will.

As I said, back of the envelope calculations will get you whatever outcome you desire. Real actual spending data will tell you the real story. There isn't a substitute.

350K in Missouri will give you a vastly different lifestyle than 350K in Denver.

If you have everything you want, no need to track!

> Adding all of it together is too much. So you set the thermostat lower by 3 degrees. Pack lunches two to three days a week and cut down the coffee a certain percentage etc.

Yes, I understand, I'm not stupid. I'm sure you can understand what's implied by my comment. I am saying all of that together is a ridiculous amount for a top 5% earner once summed.

We are not talking scrambling family of four here. At some earning level, difficulty paying the bill is nearly always structural.

It annoys people because it's easier to cut a cup of coffee than to admit you over mortgaged and the solution is obviously far less simple.

> Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard

I’d say that budgeting allows you to see how far off your ideal standard you are living. Spending too much on the kids school can be a deliberate choice or an afterthought from 4 years ago. Budgeting lets you see that and be deliberate about those choices.

It's not that your wrong (you are), but that budgeting will give you a fuller picture and help you align your spending with your values.

Paying too much for school? If cutting on those sandwiches means you can suddenly afford the school, would you choose to cut the school just because it's a clear, known large expense?

Earlier in my career I always wondered why people earning a lot more than me would not get lunch from outside or the cafeteria but would spend a lot of effort cooking and prepping the food for their work. Now I fully understand where they're coming from.

The little things do add up.

The point of my comment was that I too believed as you did. Always easy to believe things until you track your spending and see the actual numbers.

It's also how I know getting an 8 year old car without too many miles is the way to go.

Not that a sandwich will make much difference but you have to remember that employers like their staff to be indebted, it makes them compliant.

It is not really binary.

I hate budgeting and still save around half my salary.

Though I do realize that this is a different game for some people, where some need it more than others.

You are the exception. Most people follow the “Parkinson’s Law” for money.

Agreed this style of making money may have made sense when the world was more Sane but there’s no way to penny pinch yourself into a house in 2026

25 years ago when my wife and I were poor grad students we had to do this. I tracked everything religiously and she cut coupons for the grocery store. We were generally positive about $100/month at best. Tracking it allowed us to not go negative.

As soon as we got real jobs with a real income, we didn't waste time with that. Our philosophy now is to just make sure that we spend well under our means and not track. We don't penny-pinch, but we still keep some of the grad school "do I really need this?" mentality.

Our normal spending is somewhere under 1/2 of our take-home (including mortgage), so we just don't worry about it and keep saving. It helps that we don't have fancy tastes. It's a nice stress free way of saving and we don't have to get neurotic about tracking every penny either.

It probably worth at some level not totally losing track of various subscriptions or routine daily purchases. Won’t buy you a house but can be a few thousand a year.

One of the things that the tracking taught me was to be allergic to subscriptions. I only have a few where significantly more convenient because I know I'll use it. Outside of our phones (and the kids don't get phones), we have one music service for the family, I'll allow two video streaming services and if the kids want to add one, they have to pick one to cancel, and I have a coffee subscription because the owner lives down the street from me and it's fresher than I'd get in the grocery store.

It's a good point about the routine daily purchases, I never thought of that. But I live semi-rural so I'm not out every day wandering around the city and picking up a snack or anything like that. I imagine that could add up.

That’s about where I am along with a couple bundles plus a few computer related subscripts like Backblaze, VPN, and Adobe related.

To the other point, a lot of people have a more or less daily Starbucks or other breakfast related habit.

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