Working on quantifying my credit card expenses was a wakeup call for me to start thinking about making changes in the way I spend money. I decided to work with data from September 2018 to September 2019 collecting a full year of financial data.

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For my presentation, I started with a word-cloud representing the count of the credit card swipes broken down by the expense categories. I’ve chosen to use a cloud-word because I believe is an effective way to display the categories getting the attention of the audience towards the biggest object. I’ve had used the count of swipes to set the sizes of the words. When you look at visualization, you can instantly notice that the restaurant is the biggest category meaning that is the one in which I’ve spent the most. This is because I eat out most of the time. Grocery is the next category with the most swipes. After paying attention to this, I have concluded that I need to organize myself and make a balance between either eating out or buying groceries to take lunch to work.

In the second slide, I ‘ve created a bar chart detailing where I’ve obtained all the data from. I’ve been using the Personal Capital app to organize my finances for the past 2 years. Personal Capital is an app that allows you to link all your financial accounts including credit cards, debit cards, investment, and much more. Using this financial tool has made a positive impact on my life. For this project, I’m only using the data from my main 6 credit cards to retrieve my expenses. The visualization shows the expenses type and total of swipes per credit card. It was surprising to find out that in all credit cards my major expense is restaurants also.

In the third slide, I’m using a tree-map to show which businesses and stores I’ve visited the most. I decided to use a tree-map because it allows you to show lots of information, such as all the stores and businesses I’ve visited offering a clear explanation of what my story is about. Once again, in this visualization, the restaurant and grocery categories are the winners. Bread and Honey was the store with the most swipes because this is where I go for lunch most of the time.

In the fourth slide, there is a bubble chart with more information about the stores and businesses I’ve visited. Here you have a highlight bar where you can type and find the store or business you want to know more about. The tooltips have information about how much money I spent, and how many times I swiped my credit cards. I had some difficulty putting this visualization together. At first, I didn’t know how to make the get the bubble chart, but after playing with the program and some google searches, I what able to make it work.

This is just a small part of the things I can do with all the financial data I’ve retrieved from Personal Capital. In the future, I would like to create a more detailed report showing my whole cash flow with my income and expenses. I didn’t do a deeper analysis of this project because I didn’t want to have all my financial information available to the public. However, I know that with this data I have a strong potential to make something more meaningful that can be a useful personal reference.

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