That Most Wonderful Time of Year

January 5th, 2008 · No Comments

No, i’m not talking about Christmas. I’m talking about something called the “year-end” statement that your credit card company usually sends out pretty early on in January. I’ve found that these can be a real eye-opener at times. Last year’s statement said that in 2006 I had spent upwards of $20,000 on my credit card! That’s a pretty ridiculous number and this year’s won’t be much lower due to some business expenses I put on there (for the programming work I do).

If you’re like me you both dread and anticipate these statements. Dread them of course because it reminds you how much money you wasted. Anticipate them because if you have a decent credit card company they will break all your expenditures down by category for the whole year and per month. My credit card is with Chase and they send pretty nice statements. For instance, I can look at a particular month and see that I spent 28% or $572.68 on “food” items and an additional 50% say on merchandise such as DVDs.

If I actually followed a budget properly this data would be really useful to help back up whether I am staying within my budget. The most useful category that they track is the “gas” category. I find it to be overly interesting how much I spent on buying gas for the entire year since I always purchase gas on my credit card. Heck, I put pretty much everything on the credit card just to make it easy to track and so I don’t have to carry cash. I also get Amazon reward points since I have an Amazon.Com Visa card. Given that a big part of that “merchandise” expense comes from DVDs or whatever other stuff I buy from Amazon, it works out pretty well.

Another wonderful thing to look forward to this time of year is getting your W-2. Those usually come by the end of January (I think they are required to provide them in a timely manner). That lets you see how much money the government took from you and then you can fill out your taxes and in my case, always find out how much MORE I owe the government than what they already took! I can never seem to get a refund like many people I know. I’m starting to think that these other people are actually just withholding more in taxes each month on purpose to get a refund each year. Since I do some contract work I have to pay taxes on that money usually as well as any money that my stock investments made or paid in dividends.

Well this post has been kind of random, but hopefully you will get a refund and your credit card year-end statement won’t look like mine!