My grocery budget spreadsheet turned into a two month project

I thought tracking my food spending would be simple. I grabbed a free template online and started putting in my receipts from the local Food Fair. But the categories were all wrong for how I actually shop, and it wasn't adding up my trips right. I kept trying to fix it, adding new columns and formulas, but it just got more messy. What I thought would take an afternoon ended up eating my weekends for almost eight weeks. I finally scrapped it and built a new one from scratch, which only took three days once I knew what I needed. Has anyone else had a simple budget idea turn into a huge time sink? How did you fix it?

3 comments

3 Comments

thea_mitchell2011d ago

Ugh, did you also get stuck in a loop of trying to fix a broken template instead of just starting over? I did that with my meal plan sheet. I spent weeks adding notes and color coding until it was a total mess. The fix was so dumb. I opened a blank sheet and just wrote down the three things I actually needed to track. Building from zero with your own real process is always faster than fixing someone else's idea.

west.henry11d ago

@thea_mitchell20 right? Why do we always do that...

the_wesley11d ago

My old apartment had a junk drawer I kept organizing instead of just emptying it. We do the same thing with apps, trying to customize every setting before we even use them. Sometimes you just need to dump the drawer and start fresh.