Chase Freedom and Discover It cards often have 5% cash back on category spending. However, the trackers they provide is often not very up to date and off anywhere from a few days to a whole statement period. This forces the user to go through all spending items, determine if they are within a category and add them up manually. This is a tedious task and so I devised a method to let you add it up more easier via a spreadsheet.
How’s it going everybody this is the bush today i’m going to show you how to calculate your category spending in particular in your discover credit card or your chase freedom credit card these credit cards have a limit of 15 hundred dollars but none of these really shows you the real time spending that you have on these cards this video is brought to you by weeble
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Get 75 dollar bonus on top of all of this check out my referral link down in the video description below i actually have this problem with the chase freedom card it’s not quite through the entire quarter but i have no idea how much i spent i kind of want to know a rough ballpark so i know how much remainder amount that i can spend for the rest of the quarter now
Five percent on a fifteen hundred dollar maximum is seventy five dollars that you can get in cash back if you spend anything over the fifteen hundred dollars you’re only going to get one percent so theoretically for anyone with a different card with grocery spending or paypal categories you would rather hit that limit and then move on to a different card like
The discover cashback card which also has grocery spending and you can get five percent on that card another reason to know is let’s say you spent i don’t know 900 on it so far and you don’t know how much you spent on it but if you knew that you had 600 left on it you can go to a grocery store and buy some gift card that you need maybe on amazon or something
Because you’re about to buy something really big on amazon or like apple or something right then you know exactly how much that you need in order to reach the maximum and this is great you can just hit the maximum move on to the next card now if you look on the discover website you can click on that category thing and it’ll show you how much you’ve spent for that
Particular quarter but this particular number actually lags behind by a few days and it’s not quite clear where they actually cut this off so if you just go by the number on that website you might end up going over a little bit as i have before chase freedom also shows a bar graph but they seem to lag behind by a full statement period so you might have to end up
Going in there into your statement and adding each number up yourself and on top of this the bar graph does not show you the exact number so you just have to eyeball and go okay this is like 10 of the bar i have to warn you guys i’m gonna go into a little bit of spreadsheet magic here and this is a very very useful tool no matter if you’re trying to add up stuff
For categories in banking or you can potentially apply this knowledge on other kind of spreadsheet work so first thing you want to do is go on to your chase account and download the account activity in comma separated form once you download it you can open up the spreadsheet now it’s going to show you a transaction date post a description category the type it is
Which is you know it can be a sale or it can be a payment as you can see here i paid 274 dollars there but the sale amount of three dollars and 19 cents and then you have a category here which is something i added myself just put in a formula basically what you’re doing here is checking if certain cells have a matching string of a certain type you can put in the
Exact string that you want to match in order to get all this started you click on a cell and then you press the equal sign on it and then a new formula box is going to come up on there now you enter in this formula over here it’s going to look a little bit convoluted and this is how things go on spreadsheets it’s going to say if or exact and then another exact
And then after that it’s going to be like an amount that you want it to equal to and then zero so this is a little bit convoluted because there’s three layers of nested functions in here so the first thing that you want to look at is exact exact basically compares two different strings you can compare a cell position which is d2 and then you compare it to whatever
You wanted to write so you put in quotes groceries which is what i want to compare to if d2 matches groceries it’s going to return a 1 which means it’s true now the next thing is also an exact because i want to compare something else that equals something else so it’s going to be another cell you just basically click on that cell and it’s going to show up on that
Formula and then i’m going to write something else i’m going to write paypal star ebay ink ship which is exactly what appears on one of those things that i want to match too but i want to do an or operation between these two exact formulas where i’m trying to match two different strings so then these two things is separated by the comma and then put into the or
As you can see at the very beginning it’s or exact comma exact something all right and then at the end there’s also like a little quote here that contains all of it so all of this is in the first position of the if equation so if any of these is equal to one then it’s going to show whatever amount that is in the next position if it’s true now if it’s false it’s
Going to show up as zero so the second position is if it’s true you put in that number the third position if it’s false you put in that number and i choose it to be zero so this is the mechanics of many of these spreadsheet things and if you dig deep into these spreadsheets it’s going to have a lot of different functions and it’s always going to tell you how to
Use these if you just search for the name for example the if statement here it’s going to say if expression which is the stuff i just covered and then if true it’s going to show that if false is going to show that and then if you look at the exact thing it’s going to go exact and then string 1 which is the first string that you want to compare to compared to the
String two if both of these are exactly the same then it’s going to return a one but then because i have two of these string comparisons i want to combine them together in other words or them if either of them is true so then i would use this or function or any expression comma any expression so any expression means you can put in like a full statement of some
Kind including you know the exact thing that i just put in just now once you have this done for one of the rows you can then drag the yellow little circle on that cell down and it’s going to repeat this for every single row after you do this for every single row you want to sum up all of these values that happens to be true it’s true because it’s either a grocery
Category or it’s something i bought on ebay which is a shipment stuff now you might have other things that you bought from ebay which might not be a shipment payment so it might show up as a different string in that case you can just put in a different kind of expression to match a different kind of string you just sum all this up and you can see it shows minus
593 and 20 cents which means for the rest of this march i have 900 to spend uh on this chase freedom card which means i can also you know buy a like a 500 gift card from a grocery store and it will count as a grocery category sometimes for my other credit cards i actually just plug it in manually i type in the description and then i have to think about if this is
The correct category and then i just you know put in the number if it is correct so this automates things a little bit better thanks for watching this video don’t forget to give me a like and subscribe for more thanks for watching you
Transcribed from video
How to Check Category Spending on Chase Freedom and Discover It By BeatTheBush
