Recently I noticed that several readers reached this site by searching for information on building a household budget. I thought it would be interesting to share some information about my own family's budget. Here is how our spending breaks down for the past 12 months:
Childcare 33%
Rent 24%
Vacation 7%
Household 7%
Medical 6%
Groceries 5%
Auto 5%
Utilities 3%
Other 3%
Dining 3%
Recreation 2%
Clothing 2%
A few take-aways:
1. Kids are expensive... especially in California. Rent and childacre together account for 57% of our annual spending.
2. Discretionary spending, including vacation, dining out and recreation account for 12% of our spending. To me, this suggests that increasing our savings by means of reuction in spending would be a pretty difficult thing to do. Notice also that our spending on groceries is very low as a percentage of over all spending.
3. You may be interested to know that our utility spending breaks down as follows: Gas & Electric - 38%; Cable TV - 19%; Internet - 18%; Water - 11%; Telephone - 10% (thank you skype); Other - 4%.
By the way, I compiled this categorization using Quicken
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