Ever look at your bank account and think: where did all that money go? You know what you earned. You know roughly what you spent on rent, groceries, the car. But there is a gap between those two numbers — a gap that shows up every month, eats a little more of the future you are trying to build, and never gets inspected. That gap is where your financial independence number quietly slips further away. The expense audit is how you close that gap. Not a budget. Not an app. A single, honest walkthrough of every line on your statements for the last one to three months, with one question for each expense: did I know this was happening, and is it worth what it cost me? Brad and I have been running an expense audit with the ChooseFI community in real time. About 200 people joined us over the February-to-March window. Some of what they found was predictable. Some of it was staggering — one couple surfaced $12,500 a year in spending leaks they did not know existed.…