Bad at managing money

I’ve never developed a budget for myself. Or when I did, I never stuck to it. It’s easy because I’m single and don’t have to worry about an apartment or car. I pay credit cards off each month. And I manage fine with groceries, opting for more expensive, healthier foods and supplements. It feels more like I’m going with the flow.

But this doesn’t work well in crypto because of taxes. I’m into some niche, cutting edge projects, and the calculations for taxes are complicated. Every year it’s a huge burden to backtrack all the transactions I’ve done in order to report them. I’ve been putting it off again this year.

I’ve been trying to get better at this. This year, I’ve been marking down every transaction in a Notion table and linking it to the exchange, wallet, or project that it was related to. But this is more of an estimate, so that when I can go back to get exact amounts, I can check that nothing slipped through the cracks. What I really need is a system that calculates exactly what my current holdings are across the projects.

I’m invested in quite a few different crypto/NFT/metaverse projects, and thought I didn’t have any extra money to spare for a couple new ones. I’ve even made a list in Obsidian of my running crypto balances. But I missed one. Today, I found an extra $4k in an exchange I forgot I had in there. That made me very happy. But also worried about what else I might be missing.