My Uncle’s Living Expenses

Credit: Stuart Miles

Throughout the course of my blog, I have frequently suggested that you take the time to gather some data and take a good, hard look at the sources of your living expenses. The results of such an exercise might be shocking, concerning, enlightening, comforting, or something in-between. Whatever the results, today I thought we’d practice this exercise together as we take a look at my uncle’s living expenses.

Looking at the chart below, you can see that my uncle spends a significant amount of his money in several categories. Now all these numbers are rough, but it looks like around 21% goes to medical expenses, 20% goes toward paying off a note payable (he owes some people some money they gave him a long time ago), and 20% goes toward his security system. I can’t believe more than 60% of his expenses are allocated just to those three categories! Continuing on, I can see that he has some sort of debt, since he spends 6% of his total yearly expenses on interest payments. He also gives around 13% to charities or to people less fortunate than he is, so I guess that’s nice. He’s only spending 3% of his total expenditures on transportation, and only 2% on education. That seems a little low to me, but what do I know? Finally, I guess the other 15% is all meshed together into other, smaller categories of living expenses.

Now be nice to my uncle because I really do think he means well, but I also think he could benefit from looking at the sources of his living expenses as a whole a little more often. When I break down someone's living expenses like this I try to help them figure out where their money is going if they aren’t sure, I try to help them figure out where they can cut back if they need to cut back, and I try to figure out ways to improve their overall financial standing by addressing specific expense categories such as my uncle’s interest payments. As you might imagine, this process can be personal and painful, but it can also be eye-opening.

So if you were my uncle’s financial planner and you knew he was spending too much, what would you advise? Would you solely go after his debt? Would you tell him to cut back on his giving to charity? Would you have him try to cut back on his enormous medical, note payable, and security system expenses? I’m serious, what would you do?

By now, I hope you know I would never share my uncle’s financial information with you or anyone else I am not authorized to speak with. After all, always keeping my clients’ personal and financial information strictly confidential is part of my job. That being said, I was able to share the details of my uncle’s expenditures with you today because you’re related to him, too, and his expenses are a matter of public record. In other words, he’s my uncle, he's your uncle - he’s our Uncle Sam!

I don’t want to wade into the ballyhooing of politics, but I do think some of you might find the pie graph above a little more interesting now that you know it was from a CNN report covering the United States government’s 2011 fiscal year. Switch out my uncle’s “medical expenses” for Medicare, Medicaid, and some children’s health insurance programs, my uncle’s “note payable” for Social Security, my uncle's "security system" for defense spending and international assistance, and my uncle's "charity" for safety net programs, and our government’s living expense picture should become a little more clear. It could just be me, but I imagine clamoring for more military spending or more health insurance versus spending more on education, for example, might give people pause when they look at the government’s federal budget as a whole, and keep them from getting so caught up in an impassioned speech or a fiery, late afternoon news show.

You may have caught on to my ploy from the very beginning, but I hope some of you are a little surprised and maybe even flabbergasted. Sure, take a look at Uncle Sam’s spending and reflect quietly on the sources of expenditures for our country if you’ve never done that before, but let me reiterate that the main purpose of this post was to demonstrate to you the true value and potential impact that looking at your living expenses as whole can offer.

I don’t claim to always have the answers for your budget, and certainly not Uncle Sam’s, but if you take the time to figure out the sources of your living expenses and look at their relative percentages, I bet we could get off to a really good start!

-Tom