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Canajun Finances Home » April Personal Spending

April Personal Spending

The topic of what my household spends money on has been discussed before, but here is as a percentage of my entire expenditures, what my family spent its money on last month (April 2008)

  • Tax 25.24%
  • Recreation 19.68%
  • Groceries 13.11%
  • Insurance 8.88%
  • Mortgage Int 5.55%
  • Utilities 3.94%
  • Auto 3.54%
  • RRSP 3.04%
  • Commuting 2.70%
  • Savings (non RRSP) 2.28%
  • Other 12.04%

These numbers are relatively trustworthy since I use Quicken fairly religiously, and my expenses are mostly tracked there (and we don’t really use a lot of cash in our household).

Financial Scary Things

Recreation being 20% of the money I spent things on last month. That is down to my kids recreational activities (basketball). That is one hell of a lot of money, and that is not registration fees or anything like that, that is money spent on going to and coming from and being at tournaments. That one scared the nickels out of my piggy bank.

Why was Insurance there? I pay for my house insurance in one payment every year, and I had to pay it last month. This month it will be big again, because I have to pay my car insurance as well. I also have on going Life Insurance costs that come up for my wife and myself (that was 9% of my spending).

Commuting, is actually the cost of bus passes for my daughters to be able to go to school, so that is not an insignificant amount of capital spent either.

Financial Oddities

The money I am paying in mortgage interest costs is only 6% of my expenditures in a month? Wow, that is really not a whole heck of a lot in comparison to say the amount I spend on Groceries (13%). I honestly don’t know if that is good or bad, it’s mostly confusing, I guess. Anyone care to hazard a guess, I am open to interpretations.

I am also putting 5% away in savings of sorts, in comparison to my total expenditures for the month. Since you don’t know how much I spent last month (no I am not saying what that number is), it’s kind of hard to figure out if this is a good or bad amount (it actually isn’t too bad, and I have to keep remembering that one).

Financial Insights

There are areas where spending can be curtailed, and there will be areas where spending will stop for a while too (specifically recreation), so that is a good thing. My guess is the Auto side of things is going to go up with the cost of gas continuing to go up as well.  I think also this is not reflecting debt repayments either (as this is not a category in Quicken) except for specific mortgage interest as a cost basis point. I’ll need to look at that more as well.

Any comments or insights from my readership appreciated.

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