We’ve all been there. You take a look at your bank account balance, or glance into your wallet and the money that used to be there is nowhere to be found. It’s gone, that last paycheck, and you have absolutely no idea where it went. The cycle repeats itself next pay period, and you remain none the wiser as to where all that cash disappears to.
Thankfully, the New York Times has a great chart detailing just how Americans spend their money. Even more helpfully, they’ve got three different income brackets that you can compare yourself against: the lowest fifth, the middle fifth, and the highest fifth. It’s fascinating to see how little difference there is in amounts spent on things like apparel and health care across the three income brackets, but how huge of a difference there is in spending on things like housing, transportation, and food. You’d think that since there isn’t a gigantic gap in clothing that the gap in food wouldn’t be as large, either.
The most shocking difference is in the area of financial outflows, which is explained as pension contributions, mortgage principal, and profits from sales of assets, securities, and insurance policies redeemed. While the lowest income bracket has a negative dip of $10,000, probably due to mortgage payments and other debts, the highest bracket has a staggering $47,000-plus spike! I’ll be honest and confess I don’t really understand their explanation of what they mean by financial flows, but the pure difference in the top-most and bottom-most graph spike is stunning.
The other stunning component in the graph is the speed at which new technology and new developments are adopted these days. It took the stove 45 years to reach 60 percent of American households. It took the telephone 50 years to reach the same plateau. In comparison, the Internet took only 15 years to go from its launch as a consumer product to 60 percent market share.
