Feedback: What expense in your life do you feel you spend the most money on?

[Brandon Lamb]

Hey guys,

Brandon Lamb here! I’m new to the forum but definitely not new to personal finance. Finding forums like this with like-minded people is awesome!

Just a little over four years ago, I'd just graduated college, gotten my first job, and for the first time in my life I was making really good money. I mean, really good money! That’s when everything went down hill. I quickly became the king of a good time and the prince of partying = fail. It got harder to pay my bills each month. I had to give up my nice apartment for something more -- ugh – affordable and finally to cap it off, my girlfriend of 6 years left me.

Well, I’m happy to tell you now that in the past 2 years, I’ve completely ‘turned it all around’. I knew my spending habits had to change but I also knew the first step was changing my attitude and mindset towards money.

Since I’ve gone through the roller coaster of personal finance destruction and have crawled my way out, I’m now working on a project to share with you guys!

With this project, I would love to hear some feedback from you guys on this one single question:

“What expense in your life do you feel you spend the most money on? (One that could use a drastic change)”

Example:
-Drinking with friends in expensive clubs
-Eating out in expensive restaurants
-The amount of money spent on gas for a vehicle

I can’t wait to hear the responses from you guys. I’m going to take your feedback and incorporate it into this project I’m working on

Happy savings,
Brandon Lamb

[jpg7n16]

My largest expense is housing.

The one I could afford to cut back on is eating out. Specifically fast food. ChickFilA mmmmmm (but expensive if I eat there too much, which I do)

[Brandon Lamb]

Housing definitely plays a large role when trying to save any money. When renting, staying within a budget and not spending to high of a percentage of a paycheck can always be improved

Eating out is a killer too...If you calculate how much you actually spend per week, it may scare you a bit:P

[GREENBACK]

Anyone with a home is likely to cite housing as their biggest expense. It is far and away what I spend the most on.

[StudentRN]

Fast food. Hands down. My mint.com account has emailed me several months in a row to warn me about my "unusual spending on fast food." It's bad.

[LuckyRobin]

After debt repayment, it's the cost of groceries. We've gotten it down to $500-$600 a month for a family of four (sometimes five), but that is still more than our mortgage.

[Pansori]

Besides rent... hands down, gas.

[cypher1]

Originally Posted by jpg7n16

My largest expense is housing.

The one I could afford to cut back on is eating out. Specifically fast food. ChickFilA mmmmmm (but expensive if I eat there too much, which I do)

I'm in the same situation. More house than I need for expense. And eating out less, damn you Wendy's hamburgers! But I have moved to 2-3 times a week brown bagging, and week nights cooking at home.

[EconoMutt]

It's autos for us.
We put 50,000 miles per year on our vehicles due to work.

[tripods68]

Other than mortgage payment....we spend the most are foods & groceries (include fast foods/dining out).

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

My biggest expense is health insurance, as detailed in answer to someone's question here about how much we pay for it and what portion of our income it requires.

[happygirl]

Our mortgage is definitely the biggest expense, but we are paying a lot more each month to get it paid down/off. College for the kids is a big expense right now too.

[MonkeyMama]

#1 - Housing

#2 - Health Insurance (will likely be #1, soon).

I don't think any of my spending could use a *drastic change.* Even if housing is #1, we have already done several things to keep the cost down. Health insurance is what it is. We can afford it because we control/limit the costs we can - which would be just about everything else (that we seem to have a little more control over).

[DebbieL]

Biggest expense is my housing - but still reasonable and couldn't be cut down.

After that is food. I'm working on getting that one down a bit

I already have a pretty good spending to saving ratio, so I don't think I need drastic changes anywhere. Inflation is definitely creeping up though with gas and food prices, as well as utilities.

[disneysteve]

The area I'd most like to improve at our house is food, both dining out and eating in. We don't do nearly as much from scratch cooking as we used to because we just aren't home much to eat meals together or we're too exhausted to cook or we don't have what we need in the house when we need it. So we end up doing more processed stuff. Cutting back on this would help both finances and health. It is definitely something we need to work on.

[Scanner]

Fast food.

[NJDebbie]

Besides mortgage, at the moment we are spending the most on college tuition for our son. Approximately $5800 every 5 months. Luckily he hopes to be done by August of 2012, but son #2 will go to auto tech school right after that. We'll be paying for another two years.

[Brandon Lamb]

Really great responses guys Thanks! I'm using all your feedback so keep it up!

Health insurance and food seems to be a really big expense for a lot of us. Going out to expensive restaurants and spending huge amounts of money at the grocery stores were one of the biggest obstacles I went through but the payoff in the amount of money I've saved over the years has been well worth it.

Keep the feedback coming guys!

[woodie96]

I would have to say dining out also. When DW and I got married in 2002, I had 2 kids, she had 5....so for many years we cooked for a ton of folks every night. Now that the kids have grown and all but one have moved on, we find ourselves eating out much more than we should.

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

Originally Posted by Brandon Lamb

Really great responses guys Thanks! I'm using all your feedback so keep it up!

Using it how, Brandon? What is your project mentioned in your first post?