A short transcript excerpt from Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich (IWT) podcast episode where Ramit and a guest discuss personal budgeting and expense tracking. The guest describes very granular tracking (about 32 budget categories and long-term use of an expense-tracking app), while Ramit emphasizes simplicity in finances.
So you decided to take control of your money. You're on top of it. How many different Excel spreadsheets and budgets do you have? Tell the truth.
One Google spreadsheet, but it probably has 20 hidden tabs.
And how diligent have you been in tracking your spending? Let me guess. Extremely. Go ahead.
Correct. We both have used an app that I love for the last 10 years to track every expense anytime we swipe our credit card.
So you track everything?
How much we spend on groceries per month, clothing.
How many categories do you have?
More than.
Tell me. Wait. However long this takes, I'm gonna run completely dead air. I will burn literally gigabytes right now just watching them. Look, he's still counting. He's literally counting, like, 300 digits of PI right now. This is unbelievable. 32. 32. Wow. So simple. You ever hear me say that phrase, fight for simplicity in your finances? She goes, yeah, that's a great phrase. I chose not to adopt that.
