What Do People In The Us Spend Their Money On

How much do US households spend and how does it change with historic period?

This visualization is one of a series of visualizations that present U.s. household spending data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This one looks at the age of the primary resident.

Usa Household spending by income group
US Household spending by age of primary resident
U.s. Household spending by education level of master resident
Us Household spending by household limerick

This visualization focuses on the historic period of the primary resident. This is defined in the BLS documentation as the person who is first mentioned when the survey respondent is asked who in the household rents or owns the home.

I obtained data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), based upon a survey of consumer households and their spending habits. This data breaks downwardly spending and income into many categories that are aggregated and plotted in a Sankey graph.

One of the primal factors in financial wellness of an individual or household is making sure that household spending is equal to or below household income. If your spending is higher than income, yous will exist drawing downward your savings (if you lot have whatever) or borrowing coin. If your spending is lower than your income, y'all will presumably exist saving money which tin can provide flexibility in the time to come, fund your retirement (possibly even early) and generally requite y'all peace of heed.

Instructions:

Hover (or on mobile click) on a link to go more information on the definition of a particular spending or income category.
Apply the dropdown carte du jour to look at averages for dissimilar groups of households based on the age of the primary resident. This data breaks households into groups (under 25, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65-75 and over 75). The composition of households and income change as the historic period of the primary resident changes, which in turn affects spending totals and individual categories.

As stated before, one of the keys to financial security is spending less than your income. We can see that on average, income tends to increase with the household primary age up to the 45-54 group, then declines from there.

The youngest group (under 25) tends to borrow or draw down on savings to alive their lifestyle, while the same is true of the over 75 historic period group. This is probably because seniors tend to describe down savings that were built up specifically for this purpose, and higher students borrow to go to schoolhouse. Social security also makes up a big portion of income for the older historic period groups.

How does your overall spending compare with those in your income group? How about spending in individual categories like housing, vehicles, nutrient, clothing, etc…?

Probably i of the best things you can do from a financial perspective is to become through your spending and empathise where your money is going. These sankey diagrams are one way to do information technology and come across information technology visually, but of grade, yous tin can just make a table or pie nautical chart or whatever.

The primary thing is to understand where your coin is going. Once you've done this you tin can be more conscious of what y'all are spending your money on, and and then determine if y'all are spending as well much (or besides little) in certain categories. Having context of what other people spend money on is helpful besides, and why it is useful to compare to these averages, even though the income level, regional price of living, and household composition won't look exactly the same equally your household.

Click Here to view other financial-related tools and data visualizations from engaging-data

Here is more information about the Consumer Expenditure Surveys from the BLS website:

The Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) collect information from the The states households and families on their spending habits (expenditures), income, and household characteristics. The strength of the surveys is that information technology allows data users to relate the expenditures and income of consumers to the characteristics of those consumers. The surveys consist of ii components, a quarterly Interview Survey and a weekly Diary Survey, each with its own questionnaire and sample.

Information and Tools:
Data on consumer spending was obtained from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys, and aggregation and calculations were washed using javascript and code modified from the Sankeymatic plotting website. I aggregated many of the survey output categories and then as to make the graph legible, otherwise in that location'd be 4x as many spending categories and all very small and hard to read.

household spending