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Consumer Expenditures Survey
11-04-2014, 12:56 PM
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#1
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 4,629
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Consumer Expenditures Survey
We occasionally have "What did you spend last year?" threads. The dialogue in those threads can be interesting, but I also like to see statistics. How do we compare to the "average US couple" of about our age?
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics gets thousands of people to fill out very detailed spending reports that should answer that question. These numbers impact all of us because they are the source of the weights used in CPI calculations. But, I've just got a curiosity question for the slice of the data that's "like us".
The BLS provides many sample tables here: Consumer Expenditure Survey
Unfortunately, none of them have exactly what I wanted. Fortunately, they also put the "micro-data" online. Anyone can download every answer to every question from every family. I used that data to put together a table that's closer to my interests. Maybe it's also interesting to other people here.
All the data here is for married couples, with no children at home, with both spouses over age 60:
CATEGORY | Owner _____ | Renter ____ | Both ___ | Food at home | 4,562 | 3,241 | 4,296 | Food away from home | 2,378 | 974 | 2,181 | Mortgage interest | 2,539 | 15 | 2,334 | Mortgage principal | 1,937 | 146 | 1,790 | Property taxes | 3,071 | 75 | 2,826 | Homeowners insurance | 611 | 6 | 562 | House maint, repairs, flooring | 1,806 | 9 | 1,662 | Rent | 61 | 11,620 | 950 | Electricity | 1,633 | 1,023 | 1,583 | Heating fuels | 740 | 223 | 697 | Water, sewer, trash, … | 660 | 189 | 622 | Major appliances | 283 | 101 | 266 | Housekeeping services | 874 | 300 | 826 | Cleaning Supplies | 359 | 183 | 330 | Other housekeeping supplies | 611 | 215 | 559 | Furniture | 429 | 222 | 411 | Smal appl, misc HH eq & textiles__ | 1,265 | 535 | 1,165 | Other lodging | 652 | 243 | 617 | Telephone services | 1,245 | 1,049 | 1,227 | Computer information services | 356 | 206 | 343 | Clothing | 1,290 | 570 | 1,189 | Cars, net purchase + lease | 3,809 | 889 | 3,568 | Vehicle finance charges | 152 | 103 | 148 | Car insurance | 1,149 | 1,114 | 1,100 | Gasoline and motor oil | 2,346 | 1,459 | 2,277 | Car maint & repairs | 1,085 | 519 | 1,030 | Car rental, prkng, tolls | 260 | 232 | 256 | Public transportation | 17 | 82 | 22 | Other vehicles | 19 | - | 18 | Health insurance | 4,623 | 2,861 | 4,490 | LTC insurance | 322 | 77 | 303 | Dental, Eyecare, Hearing Aids | 862 | 400 | 825 | Other medical | 1,326 | 957 | 1,280 | Personal services | 56 | 30 | 54 | Fees and admissions | 646 | 148 | 601 | Cable/Satellite services | 848 | 579 | 826 | Other AV equip & services | 166 | 169 | 163 | Pets, toys, hobbies, … | 651 | 332 | 605 | Other Ent supp, eqp, services | 515 | 12 | 474 | Personal care products | 385 | 452 | 375 | Personal care services | 421 | 261 | 408 | Reading | 207 | 104 | 198 | Education | 162 | 214 | 162 | Alcohol | 478 | 282 | 442 | Tobacco | 172 | 305 | 182 | Miscellaneous | 770 | 290 | 724 | Alimony and child support | 39 | 5 | 36 | Gifts to f & f, educational | 475 | 133 | 449 | Other gifts to f & f | 2,769 | 736 | 2,589 | Tax deductible contributions | 2,549 | 758 | 2,409 | Life and other pers insurance | 743 | 325 | 711 | Travel food and alcohol | 630 | 143 | 594 | Travel lodging | 739 | 128 | 697 | Travel gasoline | 239 | 64 | 225 | Travel public transportation | 959 | 319 | 916 | Travel other | 177 | 22 | 165 | TOTAL | 58,128 | 35,649 | 55,758 |
I'd like to right-adjust the numbers in the columns, but don't know how. Any suggestion?
Note that only 33% of the owners had mortgages. So, those that did paid $7,617 in interest and $5,811 in principal.
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11-04-2014, 01:09 PM
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#2
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 4,629
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Caveats:
Although the BLS does thousands of surveys each quarter, the data above comes from just a small slice of the total sample.
They do "interviews" for larger expenses, like rent, each quarter. In the interview, they ask the contributor to remember (or look up) spending for the prior three months.
They do "diaries" for smaller expenses like food. For the diaries, they ask the contributor to make detailed entries every day for two weeks for each individual expense (yes, that means each item on the grocery receipt is entered separately). They do one two-week period each quarter for each family.
The "owner" column above averaged 599 interviews per quarter, and 272 weekly diaries.
But, the "renter" column only averaged 54 interviews and 25 diaries.
The BLS says that owners outnumber renters by about 11 to 1 in this group of older couples.
So, I'm not really sure that renters spend more on tobacco than owners, it might be they just happened to hit some heavy smokers in the random drawing.
The main reason that I showed them separately is that I wanted to show the housing expenses for owners without having them averaged in with the renters.
Also, I've barely sampled all the extensive documentation on what actually gets into each of the rows above. It exists, but it is lengthy. This can impact comparisons. For example, our expense tracking puts everything that we sometimes buy at the "grocery store" into a single category. It contains food, and also paper towels, toothpaste, shampoo, laundry detergent, and even dryer sheets. So, if I want to compare our "supermarket" category to the BLS numbers, I need to combine their "Food at home", "Cleaning supplies", and "Personal care products" lines.
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11-04-2014, 01:28 PM
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#3
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Feb 2013
Posts: 9,358
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The CES helped us to realize how much expense creep we had over the years. We've had great success using it as a benchmark to see where we could focus our cost cutting efforts.
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11-04-2014, 01:47 PM
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#4
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Moderator
Join Date: Oct 2010
Posts: 10,725
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That's cool info! It would be great if every store receipt and every bill you got would break the expense down into those defined categories...I was thinking cramming the data into a qr code or something. That would make tracking by these small categories feasible. I might hit 6 categories in a trip to super walmart, so can't be bothered getting that detailed.
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11-04-2014, 05:45 PM
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#5
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Recycles dryer sheets
Join Date: May 2012
Posts: 421
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I was tracking pretty good until I hit the alcohol category, methinks I spend that much each month. Good thing the mortgage is paid off.
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11-04-2014, 06:11 PM
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#6
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 4,629
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sengsational
That's cool info! It would be great if every store receipt and every bill you got would break the expense down into those defined categories...I was thinking cramming the data into a qr code or something. That would make tracking by these small categories feasible. I might hit 6 categories in a trip to super walmart, so can't be bothered getting that detailed.
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Yes, like I said, we can hit three categories on one trip to the grocery store. I added the BLS detail together rather than try to take ours apart when I compared.
But, it's interesting that we do carry detail for a lot of these. For example, if I look at my annual spending summary, I'll see separate totals for electricity, natural gas, and sewer/water.
(Of course, since I wrote the report, it probably reflects some of my breakdowns.)
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11-04-2014, 06:18 PM
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#7
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Nov 2011
Posts: 3,906
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interesting that renters spend more on smokes
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11-04-2014, 06:36 PM
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#8
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: St. Louis
Posts: 1,563
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Is it cheaper to rent or do homeowners just spend more money?
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11-04-2014, 07:14 PM
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#9
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 4,629
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rec7
Is it cheaper to rent or do homeowners just spend more money?
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I expect that people with lower incomes rent.
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11-04-2014, 07:21 PM
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#10
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 4,629
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GrayHare
interesting that renters spend more on smokes
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Two possibilities:
1 - Lower income people are more likely to smoke. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200...-charted/?_r=0
Assuming renters are, on average, lower income people, this may just reflect that relationship.
2 - Note that they only averaged 54 interviews from renters. If smoking is fairly rare, a random drawing might get a few "too many" smokers and give an unreliable result.
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