I am appalled at the cars and utilities. We spend about $2500 a YEAR on electricity, natural gas and water. For the phones, I get a blackberry paid by my employer. The other 3 people in the family are on a cellphone family plan with unlimited texting. These 3 phones cost about $150 a month. With landline and DSL internet make that $200 a month for phones which some folks would find expensive.
The cars. You put car insurance in a separate category, so I'm not sure how you can spend $1050 on cars. Details?
I can totally see spending this. In fact I've been spending more.
On the house we are putting on the market today to sell, our last electric bill was over $900 and was over $1000 the month before (house is all electric and winter was colder than usual). We live in an area with heavy AC use in the summer and electric is over $1000 a month in the summer months.
The house is almost 4500 sf and is not energy efficient in the least.
Now I suspect this will be changing with the 1900 sf house we just bought (first electric bill was $117) but with a large house I can sure see utilities over $1000 a month particularly if it is not energy efficient.
As far as spending $1050 a month on cars we about that. Fuel is about $400 to $450 a month (long commutes to work, this will go way down with retirement). Tolls are about $250 a month -- discretionary but if we didn't incur them a 45 minutes drive would be a 2 hours drive. Again, will go way down with retirement.
Auto insurance is high since we have a male teenage driver in the house.
The OP's costs don't seem outrageous to me really (and I agree he left out the fun stuff) but he has to decide if he wants to change the lifestyle or not.
For us, we decided that being able to retire now meant changing houses. We bought our new house last month and it is much cheaper to maintain. We worked out between mortgage and maintance and utilities the old house was costing us over $50k a year! (New house we paid cash for).
When I had to decide whether to work years longer to maintain that house (lovely though it is) I had little difficulty deciding to downsize to something we could pay cash for that had much lower maintenance costs.