If you are like most people (including us!), there are things you could do to accelerate your journey to Financial Independence (F.I.). Everyone has this opportunity. We are fortunate to live in a time and place that allows each of us to make incremental progress towards our individual goals. Our mission is to help folks on their respective journeys. Your goal may be traditional retirement or early F.I., or something else entirely. We think we can help in some small way.
We decompose business problems for a living so that solutions become evident for the stakeholders. One of the murkiest problems in the F.I. space is how much a person needs spend throughout their lives. We built this little app visualizing the BLS’ Consumer Expenditure Survey results to help folks see what other people from their similar circumstances spend on different categories at different ages. Think of it as a visual spending tool. If you can use this information, to reduce uncertainty around your future expenses and make your F.I. decision a little earlier, that’s a win (and of course, consult a financial professional before making any decisions; we’re just random blokes on the internet)!
In the Inputs pane, enter an income and the relevant demographic information for the group you want to learn about. The first plot is a histogram of incomes for the group. It also shows the entered income’s percentile for that group. Next, you can see boxplots showing the range of expenses folks with those same demographics had. The black line in the boxplots shows the income percentile translated into expenses. Finally, the table shows the percentile values. See our blog post tome for more details. Our visual spending tool: