Case study: 2003 citi bank credit card statements and my analysis

March 9, 2019

Introduction

It is my personal finance research. I wonder why I am struggling in my personal finance, and I decide to work on personal finance research. One thing I have to do is to export all transaction from citi bank statements in pdf file to an excel sheet, and then extract the amount for each transaction, add Category column and store column, and then generate report.

Case study

Here is my 2003 citi credit card statement's analysis.

Open research

I am working on personal finance research. I like to find ideas how to analyze those data. Based on a few more facts, I can tell that there are a few things I should work on.

Step to generate report

1. Download statements from citicards.com
2. Copy and paste all transaction into Excel sheet
3. Run excel script to extra last 5 or 5 chars to get dollar amount
4. Use Excel -> Data -> column from text to number
5. Add more columns like year, month, store, category
6. Apply filter on excel sheet, expedite the work to apply multiple transaction one time.
   Like filter 'publix', apply more than 30 transactions to grocery, store: publix once
7. Work on big purchase item, or multiple purchases expenses first.
8. Work on blank items on category, solve one by one for last 30 or 50 items.

Here is the github folder called