Where Is All Our Money Going?

Where does our money go? Bloomberg View looked at consumer purchasing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the past three decades and compared how the rich spent their money compared to the poor (and then they presented their findings in a slideshow, which I don’t love but what are you going to do).

According to their findings, both the rich and poor spend a higher percentage of their incomes on housing now than they did 30 years ago, college costs have soared more than 500 percent, health care spending has risen for both the rich and the poor, and food spending has increased among the poor, taking up a bigger part of their budget.

Where are we spending less? Clothes for one (because they’ve gotten cheaper), and we’re also spending less on vices like cigarettes and booze. The four big things that are busting our budgets are: Housing, food, transportation, and health care — the poor spends more than three-quarters of their budget in those four categories.

The data shows that we’re not busting our budgets by shopping too much. The costs of needs like housing and food is what’s really hurting our budgets.

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