One of the things that I would encourage everyone to do if you go through this process yourself is first, go find some way to categorize where you spend money. Now, if you only have a couple of credit cards, most issuers have like an annual summary. So you could go pull up the end of year 2024 summary and it usually breaks down your spending by category.

For us, we have so many cards across so many issuers that compiling all that data together would take a lot of work. And I know for some of them, it's a PDF. Obviously, I could probably just throw all those into ChatGPT and ask a question, which now that I'm thinking about that process might've been easier.

But we also use a app called Copilot to do all of our budgeting. I'm a huge fan of it. And that makes it really easy for us to go and say, where do we spend all our money? Because we categorize all our transactions. So I can go in and say, how much did we spend on dining?

How much did we spend on these various categories?