How I Failed To Beat Anxiety and Decided To Control It Instead

Most of my income is in US dollars and my expenses are in euros, so exchange rate swings sometimes hit my wallet pretty hard. It often feels like it is never the right moment for any big purchase, because the rate is 'kind of' not great.

I could not get rid of these feelings, so what do you do then? Exactly. You take the situation under control, because control creates at least an illusory sense of confidence.

Inputs:

1. Wise API (my main account is with Wise)

2. Programming skills

3. Grafana

Result:

1. I wrote a Prometheus exporter in Python that calls Wise every 30 seconds for the latest FX rate

2. I hooked this exporter up to Prometheus (actually VictoriaMetrics, but that is not important here)

3. I built dashboards in Grafana

4. I set up thresholds for the USDEUR rate so that I get alerts when it goes outside that range

The screenshot does not include another graph that converts my income from dollars to euros, and one more that shows my apartment rent in dollars (with an average value).

Now when the dollar weakens, I am still anxious, but at least I can measure my anxiety with numbers 😅