how high I value “mexican” food...
February 06, 2003, 04:58 pmI noticed the other day that my bank's online services offer to export transaction details in a variety of formats, including CSV. In efforts to maintain my geekiness as well as satisfy my curiousity, I decided to write a quick ’n dirty application to see what I'm spending my money on, and how much I'm actually spending.
I decided to use the PHP-based application framework that JB and I have built, “Enterport.” It's a collection of useful functions and stuff that allows for rapid development of applications on linux & windows platforms; apache or IIS webservers; and MySQL or MS SQL Server databases.
I created a few tables, used mysql's excellent LOAD DATA INFILE functionality, whipped up two PHP pages, and it's finished.
What I found was pretty shocking...
In the past year (excluding January... my bank only had February 2002 to present information), I have....
- used my creditcard at a restaurant 143 times, spending an average of 7.92 dollars per meal for a total of 1,133.03 dollars!
- purchased gas 77 times, spending an average of 11.31 dollars, for a total of 870.66 dollars!
- went to the grocery only 79 times, spending an average of 12.93 dollars (about the price of quart of milk + gallon of juice + box of cereal? haha), for a total of 1021.19 dollars!
- Eaten at the restaurant referred to as “Ocho” 19 times, averaging 9.12 dollars per meal, for a total of 173.37 dollars! (what's especially funny is that our first visit was in July, August we went 2 times, September 3 times, October 4 times, November 5 times, December 4 times. Haha.)
Of course, none of this includes when I've paid cash. Totally crazy.