Sunday, June 6, 2021

2020 Sankey Spending Flow

It hit me a few days ago that I didn't do a Sankey diagram for our 2020 income and spending. I really like these diagrams for visualizing that which is hard to visualize: namely, how income gets chopped up into various buckets.

Here's the 2020 flow diagram (click to enlarge):

Some notes:

  • This year I've added income-dependent outflows such as income taxes, social security (Rentenversicherung), my pension, and so on. That presents a more accurate picture of how much we're actually left with to budget.
  • In my wife's case (Job2), those expenses are estimated in advance and adjusted every year. So 2020's expenses are based on 2018's earnings, which is why they're such a large percent of her income. I expect that there will be a sharp revision downward once we file our 2020 taxes, but that will be months before those are finalized and accepted by the Finanzamt.
  • "Rent" includes various utilities costs such as water, heating, garbage disposal, etc. In Germany, this is known as "Warmmiete".
  • The "BLOW" categories house a bunch of personal things. That's where most restaurant, clothing, and miscellaneous stuff goes.
  • "Household" contains expenses that are agreed upon by us both and are general meant as home improvements or large mutually beneficial expenses.
  • "Rundfunk" is a cost for anyone with a dwelling in Germany. It's a controversial law that forces the public to pay for a set of media companies in order to maintain viable quality media within Germany. It costs more than Netflix for channels that my wife and I rarely pay any attention to. Nothing to be done about it though.
  • "Side Stuff" includes my small time freelancing on the side. This has never reached a level to be taxed by Germany.
  • "Refunds" include the various subsidies I received for my dental procedures as well as the first CARES Act stimulus payment from the IRS.
  • "German Debt" includes installment plans that don't charge interest.
  • "Digital Subs" includes media and cloud subscriptions.
  • Any USD-based income (such as "GiftMoney") is converted to euros for this.
  • I'm not including investment income or losses in this diagram.

No comments:

Post a Comment