2016 in re-view: graphs and stuff

Jan19
by TFS on January 19, 2017 at 6:58 pm
Posted In: Budgets, Personal Finance, TFS Updates

 

I’m part way through my analysis of the year and thought I’d just start off with the stuff that is a bit more easy on the eye so here are some graphs with a bit of commentary on each.

If you want a sneak peak at the figures that went into creating these graphs feel free to have a look 1 at the spreadsheet here.

In most cases where it made sense and I have figures for, I’ve added data for the previous year as well (that’s 2015 for those who haven’t been paying attention) to get a nice visual year on year comparison.

Right let’s get going!

expenses

 

I think the biggest thing to note here is that the latter months of the year seem to trend much higher than the start months. So maybe our £24K spend in the last 7 months of 2014 when I started tracking our expenses properly wasn’t actually so bad after all. To back that up look at the actual figures:

Expenses 2014 2015 2016
Total £24,735 £36,769 £37,629
Last 7 Months £24,735 £22,041 £24,201

Although I’m sure we spent more in the first 5 months of 2014 than we did in the next two years, it is clear that a lot of our big expenses 2 come in the latter half of the year and this is something we need to be aware of, plan for, and certainly remember not get too excited about if we’re looking like frugal sages come the end of May.

 

income

 

Not much to say here. The obvious big spike mid year is my bonus.

It’s also nice to see that, especially in the first half of the year at least, it is quite hard to tell that I’ve dropped my hours at work by 25%.

 

alcohol

 

What has been tracked must be graphed so here is a nice visual representation of how much I’ve been getting pissed over the last two years 🙂

It’s good to see a clear move in the right direction here.

I also had a theory that in the months where we spend more money my alcohol intake is higher, so let’s see how those correlate:

I’d say pretty well!

I’m not saying that drinking causes me to spend more money of course, simply that it normally means we’re out and about more, or are on holiday, and so naturally will end up spending more money as a general rule. An obvious point perhaps but still nice to see it down on the graph. Also I noticed Google Sheets has a really cool feature where you can ask it about the data in your spreadsheets and it will provide you with an answer, such as:

How cool is that!? 🙂

 

net worth

 

Here is a graph showing Net Worth, Net Worth excluding housing and Liquid freedom which you could define as anything I can get my hands on before the earliest date I can access my personal pensions (about 57 I believe). I haven’t done this year on year as it makes more sense to just have a separate and continuous line for each.

Well what can I say? A nice steady rise upwards. Obviously it would be nicer if it were a steeper incline but I’m pretty happy with how this graph looks!

 

savings rate

 

This correlates with the earlier graph on expenses, with the savings rates dropping off in the latter months of the year.

Obviously the overall savings rates are lower in 2016 which is a shame but the reasons for this are well known by now and I won’t bleat about them again!

 

death match spending battle

 

A nice fun one to end on then. You may remember that at the start of last year I reported on our death match spending battle where myself and Mrs T went head to head to see who could spend the lowest amount. She won in 2015!

I am happy to report that I turned the tide and won the 2016 edition!

No one likes a bad winner so I will never mention it again, but here is a graph of both our spendings this year:

As you can see November was inexplicably really expensive for both of us (two holidays I think!?).

The good thing to note is that both of us spent lower than what we did the year before, although I think we were a little slacker on the rules about what counted here. For example in 2015 we counted all upfront holiday costs whereas in 2016 we didn’t count a few flights paid for out of our joint account and stuff like that. It would have seemed a bit harsh to not do this, as our friends sprung on us a Dubai wedding and it would have just totally blown both of our budgets to pay for that out of the “fun money” pot. Having said that, I think next year maybe we should drop the target spending limit again and say all upfront holiday costs (travel and accommodation) are not taken out of these pots. Make the rules a little tighter so to speak and more likely to be consistent from year to year then, despite having more or less expensive travel costs depending on what we end up doing.

 

coming up…

I’ll go through expenses in a little more detail next time around like last year and forge out a new budget for next year, along with the customary yearly goals review and setting for the up coming year. Last year it all seemed like a bit of a slog and I’m going to try to be much more succinct in my wording, hopefully combining the above into just two more posts.

I’ll finish with some questions as usual…

Do you like my graphs? 🙂

Are there any more data you’d like to see in graphical format?

How did you get on last year? Where do you think we could improve?

 

Thanks as always for reading!

 

 

Headline image copyright of Deadmau5

Notes:

  1. And don’t forget you can copy and edit your own copy at your own leisure if you so wish! ↩
  2. Nearly all our yearly expenses such as car and home insurance, car MOT, tax etc all fall in the latter half of the year for example ↩
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