Comparing my expenses

Now that I have collected my expenditures via Twitter and bank transaction data, and categorized it according to COICOP, in this blog post I compare it with the typical expenditures of a household of my type with an income level like mine.

The German Federal Statistical Office conducts every five years (last time in 2008) a survey on Income and Consumption. On their website, you can find this nice visualization.

The dataset I used is provided here. It is also part of the pft package. The dataset is not identical with the official data, some information is lost by the processing.

Here is the chart comparing my expenses in 2011 with the typical expenses.

The main problem when comparing me with a typical consumer is that 15% of my expenses remained uncategorized. If I assume it goes in either Food, Recreation, Restaurants or Misc, and add those amounts, it turns that almost the half of my expenses goes in these four categories, while typical would be 35%. Especially I tend to spend more money on Recreation and Restaurants. On the other side, I spend less money on Housing (small apartement) and Transportation (no car).