I often asked this question and one of items that I have been focusing on this year is knowing where I am spending money. My idea is that  is where you spend money is what you see as important.  I often wonder how I am doing in comparison to others but even with research it is hard sometime to find some real numbers. I did find this neat graph.

I also did some further research that I am going to share as we go along as well. I am going to do an honest comparison between the numbers I found and our spending during the month of February. I will say that our spending is up for February simply because of the extra income from tax refunds we received.  Please leave a comment if you think this numbers are correct or if you see something totally off.

15% of our spending this month was on Debt Reduction  including Credit Cards. I know this is a high number for us. We pay off our lawn mower so that we did not have to pay any interest on this transaction.

14% was Utilities. This is a high number for us, the reason is that it included an additional cell phone bill we received when switching names on our account. Normally I would estimate that utilities are about 6% of our spending.

Our mortgage $594.80 represents 8.8% of our spending, combine with utilities approximately 25% of our spending which is significant less than the 33% above for housing.

9.69% of our spending is on groceries which includes cleaning products. I did overspend our budget by $55 last month but in comparison to the 13% above I am still way below.  In research, I did discover that a “thirty family of four” spends an average of $632 a month of groceries. Dining is an area that I am really trying to monitor this year. In January, we spent over $450 on eating out, by becoming aware of this, in February we reduced this to $200 or 2.97% of our budget.   This will definitely be an area I continue to monitor as the average for dining out is $223 a month but I am unsure how many people this amount represents.

$383 or 5.68% of our spending was for Auto/ Transportation cost in February. I typically budget $400 a month.  I was surprise to find out that the average fuel cost is $243 a month.  We definitely always exceed this amount but due to the fact that all of our vehicles are paid for we still are way below the 17% average noted above.

Charitable cash donations represented 5.48% of our spending. The averages I found ranged between 3 and 4%.  This is a significant decreased from the 10% I expected to find.

12.38% of $836 represented our spending on clothing in February. I do know that this included a new wardrobe for Zach and at least half a new winter wardrobe for Lily. In addition, I purchased clothing for our trip to Michigan in January in this same category. Both the kids have sudden grown significantly in the past couple of months. The reason this amount is so high for February is that I intentionally used our tax refund to pay off credit card debit for these clothing items. The only averages I could find were based one adult which was $121 a month on clothing.

Household or as call above other spending represented 7.34% of our spending. I use this category for things such as our YMCA membership or expenses that I don’t know where else to place them. I am pleased to find out that this is probably close to the national average of 7% .