2023 Annual Expense Review
Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew!
Another year, another annual expense review.
Each year around this time, my wife and I review all of our spending for the year. How do we do it? We use the methods in this post.
Why should you do it? Reviewing annual spending gives you more insight as to where your money is going and, most importantly, helps you identify “leaks” in your spending. These might include forgotten recurring subscriptions you can cancel, opportunities to request new promotional rates on things like cable service, or even something as simple as putting a credit card on autopay to avoid late charges.
What did we learn? 2023 saw some easing in inflation and also some help from our youngest child graduating from Pre-K and starting kindergarten, which significantly reduced our school expenses. Offsetting this reduction was a meaningful increase in home expenses (we did a few major home repair projects) and Food/Restaurants and Travel as we went out more and became less cautious. Overall, our annual spending increased 3.8%.
Our largest spending categories were housing and related items (38%) and childcare/summer camp (26%). Food/Restaurants increased the most of any category (from 7% to 9%).
Some key lessons from this year:
Kids - Like last year, kid-related expenses accounted for almost one-third of our spending. But as discussed in last year’s post, we are going to send our kids to a less expensive summer camp this summer.
Home Maintenance - Owning a home is not cheap! Home expenses rose again to become our third-largest spending category. Surprise expenses cropped up throughout the year, including a bathroom fan that stopped working and gradually caused other problems, requiring a ~$1000 repair and repaint job.
Amazon - For the first year in a long time, Amazon declined slightly as a percentage of our expenses, remaining relatively flat in dollar terms. Even so, it still accounts for 8% our spending.
Finally, at the end of this post, I’ve included pie charts showing our 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019 spending (courtesy of Google Sheets). I encourage you to do an annual spending review—you might be surprised at what you find!
And now…Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
Whether You Call It ‘Skiplagging’ or ‘Hidden-City Travel,’ It’s Contentious
Return Policies Have Gotten More Annoying This Holiday Season
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.
2023 Spending
2022 Spending
2021 Spending
2020 Spending
2019 Spending
