Frequently asked questions

Is this financial advice?

No. ifyouspent is an illustration tool. It shows what historical prices would have done with a hypothetical spending pattern; it doesn't recommend buying anything, doesn't model tax, and doesn't know your situation. Treat every number as a backward-looking 'what if', not a forward-looking prediction.

Where do the prices come from?

Yahoo Finance's public chart endpoint, refreshed daily into a Postgres database, then exported as small JSON files the browser loads on demand. We use the source's adjusted close (dividends + splits) so the chart matches what a long-term holder would actually have experienced.

Where do company names + HQ locations come from?

Names come from Yahoo's v1/search endpoint (the canonical longname). HQ + website come from Wikipedia's company infobox; for companies without an English Wikipedia article we fall back to Wikidata's structured location data. Coordinates are geocoded via GeoNames.

How accurate is the cross-currency display?

Today: rough. The currency picker uses a single static spot rate snapshot (refreshed periodically), not the historical FX series for each year. The approximate-fx footnote on the receipt flags this. The proper year-aware FX series ships in a later release.

Trading days vs every-day spending — what's the difference?

By default the daily cadence treats one purchase as one trading day (~252/year), because that's when the market is actually open. Most users mentally think of $5/day as $5 every calendar day (~365/year) — toggle 'weekends too' on the daily-cadence row to count calendar days, with weekend + holiday spend pooled onto the next trading day's open price.

What does 'inflation-adjust' do?

Default off: your $5/day input is $5 every historical month — matches how most people think about a number they typed. Toggle it on: $5 is treated as today's dollars, and each historical month gets discounted by CPI (so a $5 coffee today was ~$3.65 in 2010 nominal dollars). The result honestly reflects what would have actually been spent in nominal $ at the time.

How does US regional pricing work?

When you pick the US locale, a second 'US REGION' picker appears for state + metro selection. Suggested habit prices scale by BEA Regional Price Parities — a NYC coffee suggests ~$7.50, a Tulsa one ~$5. Multiplier (×N.NN) is shown next to each option. Non-US locales fall back to country-level pricing until per-locale regional data ships.

DRIP vs no-DRIP — what's the difference?

DRIP (Dividend ReInvestment Plan) reinvests every dividend into more shares of the same asset. The default ON. Toggle off to see the price-only path — the gap between the two is what reinvested dividends contributed. For high-yield assets over decades this can be more than half the final value.

Why are share links so long?

The whole scenario is in the URL — habit + asset + amount + cadence + start month + DRIP toggle + 7-day mode + CPI mode + view. Anyone who clicks gets the exact same number you did, no account, no server lookup. That's the deal: shareable, bookmarkable, reproducible.

Why is my favorite stock missing?

We backfill the full Vanguard Total World ETF (VT) holdings plus S&P 500 + top ETFs + crypto + commodities — ~9,000 tickers. Some long-tail names (Malaysian small-caps, certain UAE / Philippines listings) aren't on Yahoo's free feed. Type any ticker in the 'instead of' field to see if we have it.

Do you track crypto?

Yes — Bitcoin + Ethereum + a handful of majors. Crypto doesn't pay dividends, so DRIP is a no-op (the toggle hides itself). The math otherwise is identical to a stock.

What about privacy and cookies?

No accounts. No tracking pixels beyond the optional Plausible analytics ping (no cookies, no IP storage). Your scenario lives in the URL; your locale + region + currency preferences live in localStorage on your device only. Ads (when present) are AdSense — Google's standard targeting policies apply.

For the deeper math + data-source writeup, see how it works.