Budget comparisons
I’ve long thought that comparing budgets would be an interesting addition to the site, so we can peak at not only what others have, but what they spend too in order to help guide us to better financial decisions (i.e. if I’m spending more than somebody with a healthy net worth, maybe I should re-examine my spending). Recently there have been a couple of items looking at budgets of various American families that bring this topic back in my head. First, Tiredbuthappy has a post, benchmarking locally reporting on some comparisons in Philadelphia. Then I was reading the Liz Pulliam Weston Money Talk column in today’s paper and she reported the following average annual expenditures for a family of four:
$6351 on food
$871 on housekeeping supplies
$735 on personal care including haircuts
$2953 on clothing
(source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Interesting statistics anyway.
March 25th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen that Weston article. Interesting stats.