As promised, here’s the second part of my year in review.

To recap: I audited where I spent my time (loosely) and where I spent my money (incredibly precisely) this past year, in an effort to understand what I really value and to be more mindful and aware of where I’m spending these limited resources.

First, the nondiscretionary chunks of my income go towards taxes, student loan payments, and rent (in descending order of relative amounts). C’est la vie, insert grumbling here, etc etc. It is what it is. As an unmarried and child-free person, the rest I am more or less free to do with what I like, which is a lucky position to be in. Here is the breakdown of that discretionary spending in 20221.

Money

Doughnut chart titled 'Discretionary spending in 2022', with the following segments: investments, 44%; travel and transportation, 11%; home, 6%; shopping, edutainment, 11%; healthcare, fitness, 1%; charity and gifts, 3$; food and drink, 24%

Where my money went in 2022

(Side note: personal finance tech is amazing—I can literally track every penny in and out. Someone recently asked me where I saw digital health going in the next 10 years, and I think success would look something like every single person having a level of health literacy AND individuals being able to track and understand their health to the same degree that they can understand their finances today.)

Investments (44%)

This includes my personal contributions to my retirement and brokerage accounts. It doesn’t include any employer contributions. I suppose the fact that I put close to half of my discretionary income away for the future suggests that I value planning for the future, having safety and security, and preparing for the unknown. Interestingly, I have a tendency to beat myself up for not saving enough (probably a result of what was instilled in me by my immigrant parents), but looking at this percentage makes me feel less anxious about that.

Food and drink (24%)

Seeing how much I spend on food and drink was probably the most shocking finding to me from this whole exercise. The dollar amount was staggering, and borderline embarrassing. I’m not trying to shame myself or anything, but that is honestly how I felt. This figure includes spending at restaurants, bars, and on groceries. On a monthly basis, I spent 3-4x more on restaurants/bars than I did on groceries. My initial reaction was that I’ve been lazy and don’t cook at home as much as I should. If I were to be kinder to myself and pretend like I was talking to a friend who disclosed this to me sbout themselves, I’d say there were more factors at play that influenced this level of spending, not all of which are “bad” or within my control:

  • In part this is a holdover from lockdown when truly one of the only joys was food (I spent a LOT of time, money, and energy on food in 2020 and 2021).
  • Now that I work from home the vast majority of the time, sometimes going out to grab food is the only chance I get to leave the house all day. 💡 This feels like an opportunity
  • I DO genuinely get a lot of joy out of food, whether it’s making my own or getting takeout or going out to a restaurant. I like trying new restaurants occasionally, and I like going to my favorite spots even more.
  • Living in New York makes it VERY convenient to have endless amazing food options, and that convenience comes at a price.
  • Relevant to dining in at restaurants, it’s easy to rack up the bill on all the extra things (appetizer, dessert, cocktail, etc) that in retrospect, I often feel did not add that much to the experience. 💡 This also feels like an opportunity
  • Inflation.

Although I’m not a resolution-making person (it always feels like a setup for failure and disappointment), if I had to set an intention related to food and beverage spending in 2023 that didn’t feel like a punishment, I would start with the two opportunity areas above. For example, instead of using “going out to get food” as a reason to leave the house, I could eat at home and then go out for a walk more (or go out for a walk and then eat at home). And instead of getting a bunch of things on the menu that I can’t even finish or only enjoy marginally more with each additional purchase, I could start with the thing I want the most and if I really want the other stuff, add those on.

Shopping, edutainment (11%)

This (and a few of the other categories) are more granularly broken down in my personal records, and includes things like clothes, knick-knacks, purchases related to hobbies like my mechanical keyboard materials and such, tickets to events, streaming and other subscriptions, books, courses, costs related to this website, and others. Essentially, it’s the truly “fun stuff”. (“Edutainment” is a portmanteau I made up comprised of “education and entertainment” so that the spreadsheet I use for tracking would not have a category with a long name like “education and entertainment”.)

Travel and transportation (11%)

These are also separated more granularly in my personal records but Travel includes plane tickets, rental cars, hotels and Airbnbs, and other travel expenses (food and drink consumed while traveling is not included here and is part of the “Food and drink” category above). Transportation includes subway fare, Lyft rides, and Citi Bike rides. This seems like a reasonable amount to me. If I were to successfully spend less on food and drink, I think I’d put the extra funds towards travel.

Home (6%)

This includes essentials like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, garbage bags, etc, as well as furniture, picture frames, clocks, and other home accessories. The bigger purchases I remember from this year that felt special were an armchair and ottoman which I used to make a cozy reading corner in the bedroom, which has brought me a lot of joy.

Charity and gifts (3%)

This section includes donations to nonprofits and gifts for family and friends.

Healthcare, fitness (1%)

Like half of all Americans, my employer covers the majority of my healthcare, so the “healthcare” part of this figure represents my portion of the premium, copays, and other relatively minor out-of-pocket expenses. Fitness includes things like expenses for my bicycle, running shoes, etc. I could dedicate a whole blog (not blog post, a whole ass BLOG) to healthcare spending and value but for now I will just say that I am grateful to be healthy. (I think this is also where my dictum that the things I spend most of my time and money on dictate what I value most, because I don’t actually spend that much time and money on my health, yet I value it very highly. I think especially in this country, baseline health and its relationship to one’s quality of life is really a matter of luck, which is a little sad and terrifying.)

After having completed this exercise and reflecting on it, I think I’m pleasantly surprised with how I spent my year, and I have some thoughts about where to tweak in 2023, which I guess was the goal.

  1. A note on my methods here: I track my finances by exporting .csv files from my various accounts into a spreadsheet which I then need to do some basic tweaking on (some accounts use negative numbers to denote debits while others use negatives to denote credits; Venmo is the most painful to reconcile given that the memos are often in emoji or GIF form that made sense at the time but when auditing, it’s impossible to remember what “fish emoji sparkle emoji red circle emoji” was referring to), and then manually assigning categories. While many personal finance apps do this automatically, I find it’s not always accurate, but more importantly to me, the routine of going through each charge in retrospect helps increase my awareness and accountability for not mindlessly spending in the future. I don’t know if that’s a good use of my time or not. Anyway, I then used the spreadsheet to automatically generate a doughnut chart, which I exported as a PDF and styled in Adobe Illustrator. I think a fun 2023 hobby would be to learn more data visualization skills. Well, this footnote is getting so long, it’s turning into a… feetnote! ↩︎