Analyze monthly expenses - know where your money goes!

This post belongs the series I am going to write for engineers who are just about to start their careers and/or have just started their career. The ideas discussed here are useful for others who are in their beginning years of investing and gaining hold of their finances.

To get hold of your financial life, you must first understand how your current spending habits are. Here I broke down expenses of a typical engineer. By typical I mean:

·        single

·        works full time (and often times, overtime)

·        not much partying on weekdays

·        eats lunch outside most of the days

·        weekends are for enjoyment

·        shares an apartment with one or two apartments

·        has a smartphone and a cable connection

·        drives to work about 10 miles roundtrip every workday

A typical monthly expense is shown in the table below. All numbers are in USD.

Food	310
Gas	134
Housing	675
Connectivity	120
Entertainment	89
Shopping	167
Travel	250
Insurance	69
Car loan	365
Total	2179

A pie chart of the expenses is given below:

Before we start talking about the numbers, let’s look at how I got them. 

I gathered the data from my own expenses during the first couple of years after joining my first job and also by talking to my friends who were in similar situations.  Your expenses might be different, but I think the percentages will come about the same. There are a couple of my friends who had student loans, which I didn’t include here. I need to gather more data before I can do that.

Now let’s look at the data in more details.

Housing (31%)

It is no surprise that housing is the biggest chunk of our expenses. No matter whether we own a car or not, no matter whether we party or not, we need to pay rent every month. Since most of my friends live in Bay Area, San Diego or Seattle, I only considered the housing prices in these areas. Since most of the engineering companies are in or around these cities (apart from Austin and Dallas) I suppose we can agree that this is a true representation of the housing expenses. A two bedroom apartment in these cities run anywhere between $1300 and $2000. Assuming you share the apartment with at least one person, the rent would come about $650. I have also added basic utilities into housing expenses.

Transportation (23%)

Car loan: Most of my friends bought a new accord, civic or Mazda when they started their careers. Some of them bought 1 or 2 year old cars. These used to cost just around $20,000. The loan amount I calculated is on $20000 loan with 4.75% interest rate. The monthly payment comes about $375. Currently I pay $365 towards my car loan. This puts car loan at 16% at the second place.

Gas: Assuming you drive about 10 miles per weekday and about 100 miles per weekend, you would be driving about 10000 miles an year. With an average mileage of 25mpg, it would need 400 gallons. With the current gas prices ~$4/gal it would be $1600 / year or ~$164/ month.

Food (14%)

Most engineers eat out almost every day at lunch time. Assuming each meal costs about $7 (almost the cheapest you could probably find in a food court, not counting for McDonald’s type fast foods), that’s at least $140 for lunches. Add your dinners, breakfasts and those weekend party dinners we go to, the bill came up to be $310 for me during the last year. My eating habits haven’t changed in years; so I assume I was spending more or less the same during my first couple of years in my career.

Travel (11%)

I am an Indian. I go visit my family once in a year mostly during Christmas and New Year given that we have about 15 days of vacation at office. This is typical of most Indian engineers. Each trip now a days cost about $1500. Add on the top of this the long road trips we make during all the long weekends, the hotel, car rental, gas for the car, food, etc and you would end up raking about $3000 a year just for the travel. I haven’t included the gifts we buy for our family and friends back home, but I figure $3000 for travel is a very good representative.

Connectivity (6%)

Everyone nowadays has a smartphone. In fact we are forced to buy a smartphone even if you want a decent looking phone. And it costs us a whopping $90 or so. Add your internet/cable bill split amongst your roommates and you are close to $120 per month on the connectivity. If you have ipad/kindle or such devices with 3G/4G on them, add $30 at least extra on it.

Shopping (7%):

I just pulled my last year’s shopping expenses to arrive at this number. You should know that I hate shopping. I probably go shopping 4 or 5 times a year. Please check your shopping habits to find out the number.

Entertainment (4%)

How about shooting some pool or going for bowling? These two used to be my favorite pastimes with friends when I was single and working late hours. Now I was not much into drinking and hence I should say my entertainment expenses are lower than most others.

Insurance (3%)

If you own a car, then you pay car insurance. If you don’t have employee provided health insurance, then you pay health insurance premiums. Some employers only pay partial premiums and employees need to pay the rest. I paid car insurance and also my health insurance premiums for 3 months. Your number might differ.

Now you might be asking yourself: “What is the point of all this analysis?” There is, in fact, a point to it my friend.

• It gives an insight into where your expenses go. 
• It shows how much money you need to be making, bare minimum, to keep up with your lifestyle. (psst… don’t forget taxes, but we will defer to another day).
• You can make an informed decision on setting your monthly budgets
• Check whether your intuition on your expenditure tallies with the reality of the numbers

We will look at ways to cut down these expenditure in another post. But for now, I encourage everyone to pull out one’s credit card and bank statements and construct your own monthly expense pie chart. Happy analysis! Leave a comment if your percentages differ significantly from what I showed here. Leave a comment if you have suggestions on reducing any costs.