How We Spend Our Money

Friday, Jul 24, 2009

Michelle OBrien

Any advice on saving money usually starts with the fact that you need to know where your money is being spent before you can start saving it. I don’t know how many people actually track that (or want to), but now, thanks to the Department of Labor’s survey of ‘U.S. Consumer Unit Expenditures,’ we can see exactly how the ‘average consumer unit’ is spending their hard-earned money.

Click on the picture to go the the full-size version at VisualEconomics.com.

Be sure to check out the information in the middle to really understand these numbers. The ‘average consumer unit’ actually consists of 2.5 total people, with 1.3 earners. Housing takes up the biggest chunk of money – 34.1%, followed by transportation (17.6%) and food (12.4%). Bad news for the publishing industry – in case they needed more bad news – spending on reading ranked lowest, accounting for only 0.2% of spending, less even than tobacco (0.7%) and alcoholic beverages (0.9%).

It’s also interesting to see the breakdowns in some of the categories. Food spending is 12.4% total, with ‘food at home’ coming in at 7% and ‘food away from home’ at 5.4%. Which means about 43.5% of food spending – or $2667 per ‘consumer unit’ – is spent annually on restaurants, take-out, etc.

The Get Rich Slowly blog did a little digging into the numbers. And while the chart is dated 2009, apparently the data is from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2007. So take these numbers with a grain of salt – they were gathered before the economy headed south. It will be interesting to see this same data for 2008 and 2009.

I didn’t find any of these numbers to be too surprising, do you? And how does your spending compare?