Each bill is a chapter in the story of our life

I have never had the discipline to keep a diary or a daily journal. I have, however, managed to accidentally produce a pretty decent chronological record of my life. Nearly 20 years ago, I moved to London for my first job after university and in an attempt to keep some control over my ever more complex financial affairs, I started to record every transaction in and out of my bank account.

At first, this was a painful process of keeping all my receipts and then using the monthly statement to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. Unsurprisingly, I was an enthusiastic early adopter of online banking which means that I now download a few files and my records automatically update. To celebrate the forthcoming 18-year anniversary of that first recorded transaction, here are nine highlights from my spending life.

20 November 1996: cash withdrawal, £20

The first transaction. Before this, keeping track of my spending at university simply meant taking money out of a cash machine every Monday and seeing if I could eke it out until the weekend. Now, though, it was getting hard to keep track of all the bills, transfers and credits going in and out. In this first month I had only one account to worry about. Since then, more than 60 current, credit card, savings and mortgage accounts have come and (mostly) gone, along with 20,000 further transactions.

25 February 2001: Apollo Theatre, £49.50

By this time, I was enjoying the single life in the big city and had managed to find a tiny one-bedroom flat to rent, so no housemates. Many of my friends still shared flats, though, and one had a new flatmate who was easy to talk to and had a mischievous sense of fun – she would occasionally break out in tears of infectious, uncontrolled laughter. Plus, because I knew her flatmate, I didn’t even need to ask for her number.

This wasn’t our first date, but it was one of our earliest evenings out and £49.50 was the cost of two tickets to see comedian Steven Wright at a one-off gig. Brilliant, hilarious, really great performance. And Steven Wright wasn’t too bad either.

21 March 2002: Six 13 restaurant, £97.88

As far as my girlfriend knew, we were meeting up with a friend who lived in Marylebone, in central London. This was just a ruse to put her off the scent. On the way, we had to pass the smart Six 13 restaurant, which no longer exists. I said: “As we are here, it might be a good place to propose.”

She shot me a look of disbelief, put her hand over her mouth and the tears flowed – hopefully not provoked by my refusal to go down on one knee in my work trousers.

Anticipating – hoping – she would accept my proposal, I had booked a table inside Six 13 a week before so we could celebrate our engagement.

10 April 2002: E Katz Jewellers, £… never you mind

8 May 2002: John Lewis, £1,449.00

These two transactions will always be bracketed together in our family. E Katz is the Hatton Garden jeweller where we chose my fiancée’s engagement ring. We were warned that when a larger than usual transaction goes through the credit card machine, the bank rings to verify the details. And believe me, this was a larger than usual transaction.

In the few seconds while we waited for the bank to call, my mobile rang.

“Hello, this is John Lewis. Just to inform you, the sofa you ordered is now ready for delivery. We will take the money from your account when you can arrange a delivery date.”

And then the card machine rang.

My wife describes all the colour draining out of my face. In my left hand, I was paying for a sofa and in my right hand I was paying for an engagement ring. This might be the most expensive 10 seconds of my entire life.

28 November 2002: Next, £86.07

It’s not so much the transaction, but the memo written next to it that stands out. Apparently, this was the cost of the bridesmaids’ dresses for our wedding, earlier that month … It’s more than the passage of time that excuses me from not remembering the amount precisely. This transaction and the memo next to it was recorded by my wife.

As our relationship developed, I agreed to help her out with getting to grips with her own financial situation. Obviously, I was incapable of doing this without a list of transactions so our finances were joined together in a spreadsheet a year or two before our physical union received its blessing.

My wife tells me of the looks of horror and pity she receives when she tells her friends and colleagues that her husband sends her monthly accounts that detail the family income and expenditure. I know that she knows that this only encourages me to deliver ever more elaborate analysis and I pretend that this is her intention rather than a desperate plea for me to stop it.

19 April 2005: AA Carpet Cleaning £150

This was the month we bought a house in need of modernisation. On the day we moved in, we booked someone to clean the carpets. As he emptied bucket after bucket of black water down our drain he said, “This carpet has never been vacuumed.” Given the challenges we have faced since then, I have no reason to doubt him.

It was at some point during those first weeks, surrounded by half unpacked boxes and with each small job uncovering yet more horrors, that my wife turned to me and said she wanted to move back to our flat. This would probably have been unpopular with that flat’s new owners. Since that low point, we have slowly updated rooms and services as money has become available and have made a lovely family home, with the added bonus that we maintain a long list of home improvements to tackle in the future.

10 September 2007: Clarks shoes, £23.50

There’s no memo against this transaction, but it is our daughter’s first pair of shoes. She had been born 14 months previously. Aged 14 months, she was just beginning to realise that progress was quicker when she was on her feet. As it turned out, this wasn’t the last time that we purchased a first pair of shoes for a baby.

16 January 2013: Dreams bed shop, £179

Our second daughter was very excited about her new big-girl bed. We made a big fuss over the choice, letting her try out all the beds in the shop before gently steering her towards the one we were always going to buy. The only question was what to do with her old cot bed.

“I know Daddy,” she said when we got home. “We could turn my old bed back into a cot for the new baby to sleep in.” She knew that the arrival of her new sister was imminent.

“Brilliant, sweetie. Why didn’t Daddy think of that?”

My transaction log has proved to be my biggest anchor over the past 18 years and every transaction small or large has a story, whether it be trivial, momentous or somewhere in between. What started as an attempt to create financial order has developed a parallel life as our family journal of record. I’m looking forward to finding out what transactions are recorded over the next 18 years.