This is how I spent money in 2025

Every year I reflect on how I spent money in the previous year. Previously, I have manually scraped my bank statements and put together a report, but 2025 was interesting because I built a fairly overkill personal finance product to make this report easy to generate for myself.

Because it is really easy, I’m going to do a deep dive on how I spent money in 2025. (I was able to put this all together in ~10 mins)

Some background if you don’t know me:

- I live out of a van for a little more than half of the year, with the other half of my time split between various places.

- I generally am a fairly frugal person who is trying to FIRE.

- I operate My Financé, and all of the screen shots and data will come from there. 



- I don't cover income here, just expenses.

Okay, with the procedural things out of the way, these are my expenses per month for the year of 2025.

My biggest category of the year was travel expenses, which was ~$8k

Here is the per-month breakdown of my travel expenses:

The main “whale” purchases are flights, rec.gov (these are US national park campsites), and some AirBnB’s.

It's funny that American Airlines just charges you twice when you buy two tickets.

and a ton of campsites...

So flights for my partner and I for the holidays, a flight to Europe, and a bunch of campsites that I booked for time I spent in Yosemite.

All pretty reasonable! I don’t pay rent anywhere, so a lot of travel includes “general housing” expenses.

December was my most expensive month:

I spent a lot on gas since I drove across the US, about double my monthly average of $250. I do generally spend a lot on gas living on the road, ~10% of my yearly expenses.

Here is my gas (petrol for euros?) spend per month:

My miscellaneous spend was also very large in December, but this makes sense. I got my oil changed, bought some presents, and paid for ads for My Financé.

Here is my misc spend per month:

Groceries were roughly 14% of my expenses.

Groceries per month:

My biggest month of groceries was November, which was ~2x my average spend. I was in Yosemite for the entire month, and the grocery store there is very expensive:

This is how much I spent per month on AWS, with my September bill being the high water mark:

Honestly, this is out of control! I’d like to get this below 500 per year next year.

In terms of other subscriptions, I did pretty well:

This is all the “normal” recurring expenses I have. (I also pay for starlink some months of the year). I could probably get rid of Polypane ($12/mo) as I don't use it very often and pay for it monthly.

Earlier in the year I realized I was paying some recurring fee to squarespace for email (thanks My Financé!) — which I canceled, but it does look like I purchased / renewed a few domains…

I had hoped to keep my expenses for the year below 30k, but I failed pretty miserably at that (around 8k over budget, or 25%!)

I could try to prune the amount of times we eat out. In September we were in Boulder, CO and ate out way more than we usually do. March, we traveled with my partners family and also had a decent amount of expensive meals.

I will try to keep the expenses below $32,500 next year I think. That seems reasonable, but will require some care.

If you made it this far, you probably are somewhat interested in personal finances! If you are able to easily answer similar questions about your year of spending, then you do not need My Finance! If that isn't you, maybe check it out so 2026 can be a year of clarity for your spending.