Pie-Charting My Budget

This article appears in the Carnival of Personal Finance at Funny About Money. If you came from the carnival - welcome! I hope you will consider subscribing via RSS feed or e-mail.

Money Management posted a really snazzy pie-chart last week on Blogging for Change in an article on budgeting, which outlined her budget versus what she calls a standard consumer spending plan sample.

After reading her article, I decided to break down my budget on a percentage basis and see what was going where. I didn't have 4 people and 48 hours to devote to creating an equally eye-catching pie chart so I just made an ordinary one!

This exercise was a little harder than I thought it would be. I'm glad I did it because it showed me some things about my budget, which were not so apparent on the spreadsheet that I use to track my spending. My housing costs, including mortgage, insurance, taxes and utilities are spot-on with recommendations. My transportation costs are very low because my car is paid for and I have a client provided gas card.

In making this chart I realized that I needed to adjust my estimated tax payments up a hair to get me to from 14% to 15%. I am aggressively paying down my debt and that accounts for the high percentage in that area. Using this formula, I expect all my non-mortgage related debt to be retired this year and will then be able to reallocate those funds elsewhere.

On my actual budget spreadsheet the Misc category is not nearly this big. I don't name every penny but I do name most of them. On this chart Misc. just represents everything that didn't fit in the other categories. My "wants" as opposed to "needs" only represents 3% of my total budget and are bundled in this misc. category.

Have you tried this pie-chart approach? How do your expenditures measure up?