I wanted to do an in-depth analysis regarding how much money I am throwing at certain things. I keep track of every penny I spend, and I thought it’d be really cool to see how this information changes over time. This is now the second full year I have recorded this data, but since I write it down in a notebook and don’t scan/copy/back it up/use this information, I actually don’t have feedback for myself on how I’m doing over time.
I thought a little bit as to how to write this blog post because I don’t think it’s a good idea to expose hard financial information on the Internet (may make it bad for, say, salary negotiations down the line). So I decided to expose this data as a percentage of my take-home salary for the given pay period.
A couple idiosyncracies to note about how I account for things here:
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I do include bonuses as a percentage of take-home income.
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I count investing/saving as expenses.
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Percentages likely will not round up to 100% exactly, as I sometimes expend more than I get. Over time, this rounds out (e.g. sometimes I transfer savings into checking if my balance is critically low).
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Sometimes, expenditures may be negative. This may be the result of a refund, for example.
All values are rounded to three significant digits.
Before we begin our analysis, I would like to add a few more numbers to these four charts:
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I spent $2805.66 on eating out during this calendar year. This is less than the real total as some restaurants take only cash and ATM withdrawals are counted as miscellaneous, and some prepared foods are purchased in grocery stores, which count as buying groceries.
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My effective take-home savings rate this calendar year is 42.3%; this is excluding maxing out my 401(k) contributions, which would bump up my take-home savings rate to be around 65.9%. This is less than the 50% I ideally wanted to save (some people go beserk and save 60-75% (with 401(k) maxed out I think) at great cost to quality of life), but it is much better than the recommended 20% personal savings rate. I can live the life I want and be able to afford it with my one measly income stream.
So! What did I learn from graphing all of this?
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I definitely spend too much eating out, but I’m not going to eat myself into poverty: To the point where it brings me negligible utility. I am trying to practice how to cook homemade food at home so as to reduce this expenditure and burden going forward. However, it’s difficult to see myself eating my way into not being able to pay rent. The absolute biggest expenses are rent and savings.
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I am spending a healthy amount on education: The Amazon purchases are mostly all books, and many of the miscellaneous purchases are for productivity tools or workstation upgrades. I think I could probably afford to fly to a software conference once in a while, especially if I know I can make it worth it.
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I have at least one year’s worth of runway in case something terribly bad happens, but I’m definitely not wealthy by any means: As I have no other liquid assets besides what’s in my bank account, and since I do plan on buying stocks when the recession happens late next year (if forecasts are correct), I will need to plan ahead well during the first business cycle downturn I will experience in my career.