category: spending

I spent some time today thinking about how much water and electricity I consume. Fortunately, my utility companies are more than happy to give me that data to play with. Here’s what I found: The months listed on the x-axis are the months in which my billing period begins and the period goes until the middle of the following month (for example, May actually corresponds to the period 5/15 - 6/15)....

I thought it would be interesting to compare my expenses against the “Average Joe”, to see how different my lifestyle really is from the norm. It turns out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data on this sort of thing every year as part of the Consumer Expenditure Survey. And, lucky for me, the most recent data sets for 2014-2015 were released only 2 weeks ago. So, I dug in....