Wednesday, 10th January, 2024

I’m on a 22 day streak with DayOne. Even normal school days where I think there’s nothing to write about, once I start I end up adding 200 words.

I just played the bee game. It’s a game about genetics, breeding bees to get new variants and trying to get better stats with every generation. Plus there’s making honey and candles and various things from all the products. There’s also butterfly and flower breeding and the three interlink in order to get certain strains. ie. I need a butterfly to cross pollinate some flowers to get a new one which some bee wants. Or something like that, not actually got that far in it. There’s lots of things to do and maybe it feels like a farm simulator where you have all these “chores” but nothing expires or goes bad or happens if you don’t do something. You can get distracted with making a nice house or exploring the map and your bees just wait for you. So it’s not a job in middle management.

I want to setup beancount for tracking our finances, so I can use the web app fava. But I really can’t be bothered. I do want to know how much we spend each year but only at a high level, and trying to categorise amazon purchases across two accounts is impossible. Was it a present, for the kids, for me, my wife, replacement xyz, household, etc… generally ended up putting everything as shopping unless I knew what it was. I’d try and capture stuff that I bought for my “hobbies” i.e. computers, radio, books, but unless I did it there and then I’d forget as well. This is before approaching orders where there’s a mix of all sorts of things.

I like beancount as I can put everything into it, expenses, mortgage interest, pensions, investments, and can see it all together. Maybe I should just track things like account balances, credit card bills and income, and then I can work out the difference from those as to what’s spending. Actually, I should establish what our savings should be, do that, and then not care about whatever we spend…keeping a positive bank account all the while though! But then it circles back to how much do I need and therefore how much do I save. Spending is just increasing as all the kids get older and do more things, clubs and sports and clothing all seem to get more expensive as they get bigger.

I always fall back to a spreadsheet. It’s satisfying to look at my google sheets and see I started it in 2010 and have been using it ever since to track various financial related things. It’s changed a lot over the years and I have a feeling it’s about time I rejigged it a bit. If nothing more than to include the new Scottish tax bands (higher🙄) for next tax year. Probably better off sacrificing some salary to do the bike to work scheme every year and get a new bike vs. paying more tax.

Time to figure out why my bees won’t breed… 🐝♀️