You may think I am crazy or I have too much free time, but… I actually track the goods I buy and the stock of essentials on an excel sheet. Continue reading to find out how I do it.

Consumption list. But why?….

First, I am lazy. Second, I am very pragmatic. Third, I don’t like spending time thinking about what to cook. So, I created a meal schedule. To stay healthy, I roughly counted the calories of each meal and made sure to cover at least 80% of all essential nutrition variables (vitamins, minerals, water, etc). If you are interested in trying the same, I recommend you an app called Cronometer. Here you can check my schedule:

Safety Stock Management 

Next, I counted the essential products needed for cooking these meals per week and forecasted the demand. I also defined a safety stock for some products.

For example, I decided to always have in stock at least 5 bottles of 8L of water or to have 1 kg of lentils. I use kanban signs to remind myself about maintaining the safety stock like this one:

Expenses Forecasting

Finally, I also track all my expenses in the same spreadsheet. I created a list of the goods that I buy and the frequency of ordering (they include food and drugstore products). Some prices may not be accurate because of the inflation, I should update them soon. It’s a 56 rows tables, I’ll just paste a demo screenshot:

As a conclusion, I found out that my monthly Mercadona purchase is around 150€, considering that I live alone and take care of all my house chores by myself. Of course, it used to be much cheaper when I lived with my parents…

In conclusion, this small inventory control exercise showed the benefits of keeping track of the stuff you buy, even though they are essential goods. Also, having a meal schedule is really useful. The downside is that you spend 5 hours of your life planning all the stuff, but it is worth it. 

P.S. I also spent 7 hours matching all the clothes and shoes in my wardrobe to combine into pre-made outfits, trying them on and taking pictures of each outfit (this way I can simply choose a convenient outfit from my gallery and forget about the never ending struggle of “what to wear today”). But let’s leave this story for another time. 🙂