Where do my earnings go?

At some point, I began wondering how much money I’m spending going to concerts / performances (turns out it’s in the ballpark of $1k per year, which I’m totally OK with, as it’s one of my major hobbies / interests).  This resulted in me collecting data from my bank and credit card accounts, which I then hit with a bunch of string (think word / phrase) matches to group each line item into categories.  These categories were summed up to make the following graph:

 

(I decided to plot it as percent income, since it just seemed a little less weirdly personally revealing that way).

I think the numbers make sense.  There aren’t any ATMs conveniently located so I now only rarely pull out cash and use it.  No (real) vacation in 2015, so saved some money there.  I’m not much of a foodie, so I’m really not very into eating out at restaurants (again, saving money).  I buy a bunch of stuff on Amazon for my various hobbies / interests, and apparently I buy a lot more “things” in general nowadays.

The one thing that surprised me most was seeing the big difference in total amount of my income expended / retained between the two years.  2014 was a bit of an aberration: because of the move from Boston to Seattle, we were paying rent in two places, and we did have to ship a bunch of stuff across the country.  That, along with the trip to Mexico and the couple weeks between jobs apparently resulted in me being in the red that year.  Glad to see I was back in the black last year.  Perhaps I’ll re-run this script each year (make it a New Years tradition? – haha) and keep myself in check.

Edit 6/3/2018: Updated the analysis with 2016 and 2017 data. Looks like I’ve been saving much more money. Nice!