What do you spend your money on?

IAC-EZ clients tell us that they sometimes like reviewing reports – like the Profit & Loss Report – that tell them what they’ve bought and how much they’ve spent. But sometimes they don’t like to review them because they can often reveal that we’ve spent more than we intended to on things we may not really need!

It’s no different than going to the store and feeling great about your purchases until you get home and look at the receipt one more time.

Recently, I stumbled upon an info graphic (it was referenced in this blog at AllTop but the entire graphic originated at ripetungi.com). The graphic, although focused on the UK, is a fascinating study into how much people spend and how much of that spending was in cash.

Having traveled to the UK, I can anecdotally assert (and this image backs up my assertion) that Americans use credit cards far more frequently. With that one exception, I suspect that spending habits are fairly similar across national boundaries.

How do your buying habits line up? If you were to do an info-graphic of your own spending – both personal and professional – how would it look?

While seeing numbers on a Profit & Loss Report is sometimes a wake-up call, they’re just numbers and it’s easy to overlook their comparative sizes. But when you look at the overall spending on a graphic like this that incorporates size, it becomes far more telling… and perhaps even alarming.

Jessica Routier, IAC-EZ