We spend about $21,000 a month. I know because I run an automated Python script that tracks every expense. The $20 lunch, the $500 for my son’s extracurriculars, healthcare, my personal trainer, the spontaneous $40 toy my kid never played with. All of it.
What I learned from tracking for over a decade is that it is not about individual expenses. It is about categories. Our family spends a lot on food and rent. We love to eat, we live in a high cost area, and we do not even look at the bill when it comes to groceries, kids activities, or health. But we spend almost nothing on entertainment. No concerts, no live events, barely any movies. No luxury vacations either, partially because we love where we live and partially because we are exhausted.
You cannot have everything but you can have the categories you want. You just cannot blow them all up at once. And everybody, at every income level, can give up a little and splurge a little. Know what your values are and give yourself leeway to enjoy your life.
That is what this calculator is about. Not items. Categories. See where your spending ranks compared to other households at your income level, and make sure nothing is ballooning without you noticing.
About $18K of that is essential. Housing, food, insurance, childcare, the stuff that keeps two small humans alive in a high-cost city. The other $3K is discretionary, which is a polite word for “the things I feel guilty about.” I grew up watching my parents agonize over spending. Not in a cute frugal-tips way. In a real way. The kind where a restaurant meal was a family event that happened twice a year. That wiring does not go away just because your bank account has more digits now.
So there is this gap. Between “we can afford this” and “this feels wasteful.” It never closes. I save over 50% of our gross income and I still flinch ordering delivery instead of cooking. My husband does not have this problem. (Must be nice.) The logical part of my brain knows our spending is fine. More than fine. The immigrant-kid part of my brain is perpetually convinced we are one bad quarter away from disaster. These two parts do not communicate well.
I built this calculator because I wanted to know — really know — where our spending lands relative to everyone else. Not to brag. Not to judge. Just to have a data point that might quiet the noise for five minutes. Are we spending too much? Too little? Is the guilt rational or is it just inherited trauma wearing a spreadsheet costume? (It is the second one. I know it is the second one. I check anyway.)
Enter your monthly or annual spending below to see where you fall compared to other U.S. households.