Household Finances

Where the card's $126,160 actually goes

Computed by parsing every transaction line from all 12 PDFs and matching merchant names against ~200 keyword rules — not a manual estimate. "Other" is 8 small categories folded together (home & household, donations, personal care, alcohol, a Ballarat-region property charge, Shane's business expenses, card fees, and the unmatched long tail) so the chart stays readable — see the full table below for every category split out.

The lifestyle cost of eating well

Groceries split into "everyday" (Woolworths, Coles, McCoppinsch) and "organic/quality" (Clay Health & Organics, Wild Things Food, Senserrick green grocer, the local butcher, market stalls) — alcohol pulled out into its own category entirely, so it's not inflating either grocery number. This makes the actual food-quality premium visible instead of burying it inside one combined number.

More than half the grocery budget — 57.6% — goes to organic/quality grocers rather than the two mainstream supermarkets, and that's now a clean number with wine and alcohol already stripped out into their own category (see below). If every one of those trips became a Woolworths/Coles trip instead, groceries would run closer to $700–800/month total, not $1,620. The gap (~$934/month, ~$11,210/year) is the actual, isolated cost of eating this way.

Full category breakdown — every category, not just the top 8

Click any category to jump straight to its full merchant-by-merchant breakdown.

"Cafes & bakeries" now means Amann Patisserie, Florian, and genuine coffee/bakery stops only — Clay Health & Organics, Wild Things Food, and Senserrick (a green grocer) all moved to groceries where they belong, and McCoppinsch (a supermarket) moved to everyday groceries. Retail alcohol (Dan Murphy's, Rathdowne Cellars, BWS, Liquorland, Blackhearts & Spar) is its own category now, separated out of groceries. Aust Physio Association membership and Adobe moved into Business expenses — professional/business costs, not personal health or streaming. "Property (Ballarat/regional)" is 4 quarterly water-rate charges from "Central Highlands Re" (Wendouree), confirmed. The unmatched long tail is mostly small holiday-town merchants (Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads, Torquay, Point Lonsdale, Heathcote) — food and incidentals while travelling that didn't cleanly match a keyword rule.

Merchants over $2,000 for the year

Only 10 individual merchants cross $2,000 across all 2,100 transactions — everything else is spread thin. Click through to see each one in its category context.

Together these 10 merchants account for $34,819.74 — 27.6% of all card spend — across just 628 of the 2,100 transactions.

What's actually on repeat (from the 12 fully-itemised orders)

Exact frequency counts across all 12 invoiced orders — how many of the 12 each item appears in.

Nappies, corrected

Show up in exactly 6 of 12 orders, not every one. Sizing isn't a clean progression either — Size 3 (21 Jan) → Size 4 (Feb–Apr), then Sizes 4, 5 and 6 all get ordered within the same six-week window (13 Apr–7 Jun), which reads as buying ahead / working through mixed stock rather than a tidy size-up. Current size as of late June: Size 5.

Woolworths order-by-order (12 fully itemised)

Plus 17 more orders (~$2,935 total) between 12 Jul 2025 and 12 Jan 2026 found on the card but not itemisable — the website won't surface them and no invoice PDFs exist for them yet.

Spend per statement cycle

Oct 2025 is the outlier — a Bali trip (Komune Hotel, flights, Airbnb) pushed that cycle to ~$18k. All 12 bars are the actual parsed purchase totals for that cycle, verified against the statements' own numbers (see accuracy note above) — none of these are estimates.

Notable one-off purchases

The Bradley Miranda Susan double-charge (identical amount, same merchant, same day) is worth a second look — could be legitimate (two sessions) or a duplicate.

Trend check — has dining spend actually dropped?

Cafes + pubs/restaurants combined, by month. The feeling is "we barely go out any more" — the card doesn't back that up. It's basically flat all year, and the two most recent full months (Apr–May 2026) are the same or higher than the first two months of the whole dataset. Coffee specifically (Florian + Amann, the two daily-habit cafes) is just as flat, ~$400–500/month the whole way through.

Dec 2025 is the outlier (holiday season). Excluding it, the monthly average is ~$1,850 with no real trend up or down — first-3-months average ($1,999/mo) and last-3-full-months average ($1,945/mo) are within 3% of each other. If the goal is genuinely to cut dining spend, this is the category to target with an actual number in mind (e.g. a $1,200/month cap) rather than relying on how it feels — the feeling isn't showing up in the data yet.

Still recurring today ACTIVE

Active recurring floor: ~$19,700/year (~$1,642/month) — before any groceries, cafes, one-off kids spend, or discretionary purchases. Kayo/Hubbl and Plan Australia both went up slightly from the previous cut once billing-descriptor variants (Streamotion, and a stray "Plan International Aus" charge) got reconciled into the same line rather than sitting as separate, undercounted entries.

Stopped — no longer charging CONCLUDED

Adobe has been removed from this table — it's Shane's business software, not a household subscription, so it now lives in Business expenses (see the Overview category table). The $237.54 refund event noted below still happened, it's just no longer filed as a personal cost. Disney+ isn't in either table — it never appeared as its own line item on this card in the last 12 months (see note in the Qantas Card section above). Nothing here contradicts having cancelled it.

Budget read

This is one card only — it doesn't capture other accounts, cash spend, or the Allianz home insurance policy (which doesn't appear on this card — likely paid from a different account or outside this 12-month window).