Well boy is MY face red!

I was going over my budget spreadsheet and noticed that the total spending for the month was way over what it should have been on the first day of the month.

I had entered the amount for rent and the phone bill but the total spending was not equal to the sum of the individual categories. I remembered that I had made some changes to the budget spreadsheet recently and I knew that Mint was not synced with my spreadsheet but I never paid attention to that.  This month I saw that the amounts were grossly out of sync so I decided to take a look at my totals once again.

I found out that I had been incorrectly adding up the outflow column because I was using the sum function. The cells that I was adding up included a few rows at the bottom of the spreadsheet which were subtotals for some minor spending categories.

I was double counting those amounts and overstating my spending, in some cases up to $650!!!!

I went back and removed those  extra rows from the sum function and immediately saw my spending figures drop back to a better level. This means that some of my “Monthly Financial Checkup” posts have figures that were too high and my total spending for the year is actually better than I had previously listed.

This is excellent news for me because it means that I was not doing as badly as I thought at first and I was managing my budget really well.

I have adjusted the figures and will be reporting the correct yearly totals at my next monthly Financial Checkup.