For this past year I’ve been keeping track of my costs again. We did the same in the 2000s but then stopped at some point. Now I’m starting it up again.
The first couple of months were very tight. Then my financial situation improved for several reasons (including moving my mortgage to a different bank) but I kept going with the records. A couple of months’ worth of data is better than nothing, but many costs are unevenly spread through the year – a full year gives a much better picture of where the money goes.
By far the largest item is the mortgage interest, at 20% of the total. Electricity, homeowner’s insurance, water and sanitation together make up another 10%, so that’s a total of 30% on housing. Almost all of that is fixed in the short term. Even with the electricity costs, over half is a fixed fee.
Food 15%, the children 7%, and those few categories together already account for half of all my costs. The average Swedish household spends 13% of their income on food; I’m comparing to total costs and not total income so it’s not quite the same, but close enough.
Fees at 6% was a one-off fee this year for repatriating my British retirement account. I could have postponed it, I guess, but it’s got to be done sooner or later. It was fine as long as the UK was in the EU but now I run increasing risks of administrative fees, double taxation, currency swings, etc etc. Got to be done: a known expense now is better than decades of mess later when I’m retired.
Car ownership is an expensive habit. Repairs, insurance, inspection, new winter tires, fuel, parking. On average it costs me 100 kr (just under 9 EUR) per day. Do I get 100 kr of value out of it on most days? No, absolutely not. But on the days when we do need it, there is often no alternative. Even just the bi-weekly rides when the kids move with all their things from here to Eric’s apartment – how would we manage those without a car?
Still I feel like I could do so much more fun things for that money. For less than the cost of car ownership, I’ve paid for four vacations, including both travel and lodging, some of them for several people. Two weeks in Estonia for the three of us, an archipelago ramble for me and Ingrid, a long weekend in London for myself and Adrian, and an upcoming two-week trip for me (that I’m doing together with Ingrid but she’s paying her own share). I will definitely revisit the question of car ownership in the future: Ingrid is about to start on 15 months of military service, and that will change our collective driving habits quite a lot.
Media is another category of costs that I am very conscious of. A newspaper, several magazines, a streaming service, Spotify, altogether over 1200 SEK every month on average. While I could do without them, I would really miss every single one. Except for the streaming service, that’s really only for Adrian’s and Ingrid’s sake, but that’s not a very large part. Really, everything below “Car” has been well worth the money.
The smaller categories that are bundled up in “Other” in the chart are many and varied. I’ve somehow managed to spend almost 6500 SEK on kitchen equipment and utensils, and roughly the same amount on knitting stuff. There shouldn’t be so much need for more kitchen equipment in the future, I would think, but the spending on knitting will continue.
I’ve bought fancy chocolate for 2000 kr and clothes for 1300 kr. How’s that for priorities? Although that’s perhaps a bit misleading because that doesn’t include shoes for 2800 kr.
Other fun things include museum tickets for 2900 kr, potted plants for 1000 kr and birdseed for 427 kr.