Another batch of statistics is out – this one showing the percentage of our income that goes to different expenses. What I don’t get is why the government can leave out the largest expenditure that any of us are likely to have – taxes.
In the last year, approximately 10% of our spending went to the home. This includes the mortgage as well as home improvements, maintenance and the like. This is well below the average in the chart you’ll see above, and that’s okay – but it is easily our largest single category of spending. Except taxes. They rang up a whopping 26% of our spending last year.
Please note that this is slightly different from the chart that I linked above. That chart considers expenditures as a part of income. I didn’t do that. I just used the amount that we spent, as that seems to me to be a more appropriate measure. But I find it terribly convenient that the government study leaves out taxes entirely, even though that expense accounts for a quarter of what we spend in a year.
Update: True, we don’t generally spend much for taxes. That’s not possible because we never actually receive most of the money that we pay in taxes. Instead, the government introduced withholding – by which they get the money withheld from your paycheck so you never even notice that it’s gone.