I saw I had a pile of our old savings account statements and I thought I would really like to look through and see exactly where all our money went. Since I have joined here I say - oh it went to cars and IRAs and mostly our house of course. But it did dry up rather quick - where did it all go?

I thought - I want to find out. I woke up early this morning and decided to tackle it.

It was REALLY interesting. I started out a little dissapointed in ourselves as though we saved 80% of dh's paycheck, I saw $2k after $2k credit card bills (far more than we spend today and these days we put all our utilities and everything on card. I try to budget $1200/month on card).

I actually felt like maybe we weren't so great with our money before. Or maybe we aren't doing so bad now?

Then we sold our old home and deposited some cash. We didn't really make much off the home, but we paid a lot of cash to our second home, and therefore got some of our down payment back to cover that when we finally sold our own home.

We then pretty much did not touch the money for many man years. I didn't touch it through 2 maternity leaves (as the sole breadwinner). The transition to one income (even periods of no income) was absolutely seamless. I was impressed. I thought I remembered pulling much more money out for big one-time bills. But we never did!

Then we had our second son, and we went crazy. We spent like $25k in the course of a few months. Bizarre. I can't explain it.

I'll show some excel spreadsheets later. I feel better piecing exactly where our money went through the years.

I think you can also explain it that like 6 or 7 years of extreme frugality gets to you and you just snap or something. Throw in a big raise and you feel like you can spend far more than you should. Interesting. It is good to be back on the right track.