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).

Berlin's children

Few years ago, a newspaper claimed the block I live in — Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin — is the most fertile region in Europe. It was a hoax, as this (German) newspaper article points out. (The article has become quite famous because it coined the term Bionade Biedermeier to describe the life style in this area.)

However, there are more children in my district than in the other parts of Berlin. Have a look at this map:

(The base map and population data come from the State’s statistical office. Data at block level is not readily available, though.)

The place I live is marked by a hair cross. Indeed, in this district there is a “higher exposure to kids” than in the other districts, one children per 1000 inhabitants more than in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, and twelve children per 1000 more than in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Exposure is of course different from fertility, maybe that is what I learned from playing with the map.

If you want to know how to draw this thematic map with R, and add the point and the legends to it, or if you are just looking for a shapefile of Berlin, then read on.