Because I'm still unclear about where my money goes.

I spent my last semester wondering how I could possibly be so broke if all I spent money on (aside from my monthly rent, utilities, and MetroCard) was, to my knowledge, $3 PBR and the occasional $1 coffee. So, I decided to make a better effort to keep track of my spending and set some sort of budget. Following the wise advice of Ms. Sarah Telson, I set up an account on Mint.com.

Mint.com pulls information from your online checking account in order to determine where you spend your money. It allows you to set specific budgets for different categories of spending (rent, restaurants, travel, shopping) and keeps track of how well you stick to your budget. I figured the fancy tracking-my-checking-account's-every-move feature would finally answer my eternal "where did my money go" question, so I pulled up a pie chart of my account activity for the past few months. This is what it looked like:





So about 50% of my spending falls into the "Uncategorized" category. What the fuck does that mean? How is it that even this magical new-fangled interwebz thingamabob can't figure out where my money goes? All I want is for some fancy technological bot to tell me what to do with my bank account. The bot should not be more confused than I am.

Anyway, I set up some budgets and swore that I would stick with it. We'll see how that goes.