Amazon is the black hole in your budget
Though it comes with a smile, it's costing more than you think.
Pull up your credit card statement right now. Scroll through the last 30 days. Count how many lines just say AMAZON followed by a dollar amount.
I’ll wait.
If you’re anything like the couples I work with, you’ve got a whole lot of those charges, and they tell you almost nothing. They’re an incomplete story.
What “AMAZON.COM: $263.47” doesn’t tell you is that you just spent:
$30.10 on a trifold board and glue sticks for your kid’s science project;
$75.17 on soap and paper towels and a new mildew resistant shower curtain liner;
$100.15 on a sweatshirt and two pairs of CRZ Yoga shorts (IYKYK);
$25.05 on a book you’ll read next year;
an air fryer accessory you definitely won’t be using; and
something your wife ordered at 2:24 a.m. called a “silicone garlic peeler.”
One charge covers at least four different categories of spending, and you’ve got almost no visibility into it whatsoever.
This is the Amazon black hole, and it might be the single most under-discussed budget problem in American households.
Amazon didn’t become the biggest retailer in the country by accident. They engineered the most frictionless shopping experience in human history. One click. One swipe. Two-day delivery. You can buy a car battery, a birthday gift for your cousin, a bag of rice, and a set of bed sheets inside of ninety seconds and go right back to spacing out on the couch. There’s a good chance you’re watching a new show on Amazon Prime. Maybe you saw the ad for bed sheets during the show.
Man, they really got you.
IMO, this is Amazon’s entire business model: the less you think about each purchase, the more purchases you’ll make. The more purchases you make, the harder it’ll be to see what’s happening with your money.
Since all those packages arrive in the same brown boxes with the same smile on it, your brain stops categorizing. One box stacks upon another box with a soft-pack envelope in between. Everything’s just “stuff from Amazon” now, collapsing into one amorphous blob on your credit card statement. The more you spend, the foggier it becomes.
We need to lift the fog!
But before you start scrutinizing the contents of every single box like you’re the receipt reader at Costco, I want to caution you. In most households, and this is backed up by Pew data and basically every study on division of labor ever conducted, women carry more of the caregiving and housework responsibilities. They’re more likely to track what the kids need for school on Monday, whose birthday party is Saturday, and why the bathroom is suddenly out of three different things at once. Their work is too often invisible, and a meaningful amount of it gets executed through an Amazon cart.
We wrote about this in Money Together. Heather described the time during COVID when she was running what she calls the Boneparth Cruise Ship to Nowhere: food, entertainment, housekeeping, health, education, risk management, she handled all of it. Me? I was tweeting dad jokes (absolute bangers, btw) while stepping over bins of clean laundry and barely recognizing when we were running out of paper towels. You can bet her version of events is more colorful and probably more accurate than mine.
So, before you start raising eyebrows at the Amazon bill, be sure you’re taking the time to understand what’s in those packages. Your partner could be supporting the household inventory and a whole lot more in ways you cannot see.
Nevertheless, even if you fully acknowledge that one partner’s responsible for handling more of the household responsibilities (and thus spending to accomplish those responsibilities), the lack of visibility for both partners is still a legitimate issue. Two things can be true.
In these situations, what usually happens is that an argument erupts, neither person wins, nothing changes, and the same argument erupts again six weeks later when the credit card statement comes in. These really aren’t even disagreements about money—they’re mismatches of information. Two people have different pictures of reality in their heads, and they’re arguing about their pictures instead of looking at the actual data.
You can’t gain fair perspective over a situation neither of you can see.
The good news is that Amazon does give you the data. It’s just slightly buried, which again, probably isn’t an accident. But you can find it two ways:
The easy way. Log into Amazon on a desktop. Go to Account & Lists > Your Orders. Scroll through and see each package broken out with line items. This is fine for spot-checking, but it’s tedious over a calendar quarter or longer.
The better way. Head to Amazon’s Privacy Central data request page and request “Your Orders.” Amazon will email you a zip file, usually within a few hours but sometimes a few days. Inside you’ll find a CSV that lists every item, every price, and every date you bought something.
One thing Amazon will not do is categorize the items for you. That part is on you and your spouse, and it’s the most important part of all.
Sit down together, open that CSV file, open the credit card statement that just says “AMAZON,” and reconcile. Figure out which charges on your statement correspond to which items in the CSV file. Once you’ve matched them up, tag each line with a real category from your budget.
What you’re going to find is a much clearer picture of where your money is going. You’ll find some stuff that was 100% necessary and you’ll find some stuff that was pure fun. You’ll also find a few things that will make one or both of you laugh and a few things that will make one of you a little annoyed. This is all normal and an indication that the process is working.
Again, I want to be clear about something: you don’t want to turn your marriage into a forensic accounting firm. Reconciling your Amazon expenses can be a real time suck, and the whole point of money management is that it should free you to live your life—not consume it. Therefore, I only suggest you do this exercise quarterly at most. You can fold it into one of your quarterly money dates, or just order takeout, open a bottle of something, and make it a one-to-two-hour project twice a year.
If you are reading this and thinking, we trust each other, we don’t need to do this. I hear you. Our sentiment’s the same, but we still do it.
Trust and transparency are not substitutes for each other. Trust is the belief that your partner is acting in good faith. Transparency is the practice of showing your work.
When you sit down and review your Amazon spending together, you can not only make more conscious decisions moving forward but stop arguing about what’s going on with all those smiling packages.
*ding dong*
Now if you will excuse me, my daughter’s Insect Lore™ Ladybug Land Hatching Kit just arrived.
Be honest: when’s the last time you’ve examined your Amazon expenses? Let us know!
The Sub Edit: Canva Pro
After what felt like a lifetime of wading through free templates and second-rate images, I finally bit the bullet and signed up for a year’s subscription to Canva Pro. I’m honestly embarrassed it took me this long, and it’s probably a testament to how stubborn and principled I am about certain things. But we are working with a good friend to level up the design elements here on The Joint Account, and investing in a tool I can carry the torch with was absolutely necessary. I’ve had it for a whole two days and can already tell you, it’s like night and day. -Heather
We’re in the news
Douglas shared his insights in an excellent Bloomberg piece on retirement planning at any age. It’s an incredible resource that takes a multidisciplinary approach to preparing for what you know and all the stuff you don’t. We’ve always believed these conversations should start way earlier (and feel way less intimidating), so it’s awesome to see our message from Money Together included as “life advice.” We agree!
Friendly reminder to our free subscribers: all new posts arrive in your inbox. After 14 days, they will be placed behind a paywall on our site. If you love The Joint Account and want complete access to our archives, a monthly AMA with us, bonus video content, and more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Money Together is here. If you find value in our newsletter and want to support our work, please order a copy today: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, or Audible (narrated by Heather!).
Love it already? PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE leave us a review on Goodreads and wherever you purchased.
Want more Heather and Doug? Have us come talk about love and money with your organization—virtually or IRL. Reach us here.
Connect with us on social: @averagejoelle + @dougboneparth
The content shared in The Joint Account does not constitute financial, legal, or any other professional advice. Readers should consult with their respective professionals for specific advice tailored to their situation. The information contained in this post is general in nature and for informational purposes only. It should not be considered as investment advice or as a recommendation of any particular strategy or investment product. This post is not a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any specific security. Bone Fide Wealth cannot guarantee the accuracy of information from third parties.
Great insight- when I go through our monthly expenses each month I categorize the items in each Amazon and target order according to category. It takes more time but I’m interested in groceries vs household items vs personal care items vs clothes shopping.
I know I am probably an outlier but I think spending the extra step to really see how you’re spending your money is important and may help you cut back on unnecessary spending