Ramping up travel

Every few months, I go through our finances with a magnifying glass. Every transaction posted to our checking account and to our credit card gets categorized. There's some squishiness to the classification -- should the transaction at Target be Groceries or Household? But it gets us pretty reasonable insights into what we're doing.

A few years ago, I discovered that we had been paying $11/month to Amazon for Kindle Unlimited - a service we had never used. Armed with the data, I was able to get them to refund me 12 months of the service; so let it never be said that my penchant for data analysis is for naught.

This most recent trek through our data, Andrea asked me how much money we're putting into travel. Because our money is grouped by month, we can look at this either on the whole or as time series. As expected, our percentage of all expenditures tracked dedicated to travel has risen sharply in the last few years:

 

 NB, one of the intentional approaches we're taking here with how we're categorizing things is that basically everything we spend our money on when we're traveling (at least abroad) is considered Travel. The meals out aren't Meals Out; gifts, groceries, gas, and everything else is done wholly in service to traveling and as such falls into that category.