Awesome visualization of my monthly cashflow

[welliamwallace]

Hi friends! I just spent way too much time coming up with this stacked bar chart showing my total monthly cash flow.

EDIT: Updated Image for the past few months:


Notes:

• "Other Spending" includes all sorts of stuff like furniture, home supplies, pharmacy, gym, haircuts, etc. that isn't "recreational". I can see that it was higher in 2014 as I finished furnishing house than it was more recently
• 401k includes employer match, which is over $500/mo
• When I combined finances with my fiance in summer 2015 (who was a student without much income this whole time), we see a slight increase in food and recreation, but not a significant change otherwise
• Throughout this whole period I've rented out my two spare bedrooms for gross income of $1,300 per month. That will be phasing out this summer, but hopefully my wife will get a job since she is now officially a Register Dietician!
• I chose to lump food in with discretionary expenses because I hate to say it, over half of the money i spend on food is fast/food and restaurants
• "Savings / Investments" is actually calculated in a sneaky way: It's simply my net income minus my expenses. This allows me to "flatten out" things like my $11,000 January contribution to IRAs: that money was actually "saved" throughout the course of the previous year, and this method reflects it in that manner. Another way to name this category would just be "surplus cash flow". In the few months that this value would be negative because I actually had to pull from savings (see the months with high travel expenses), This value is set to $0 because negative numbers don't work on stacked bar charts. Instead, you can see that the sum of my expenses exceeds the line representing my net compensation
• "net compensation" is after-tax paychecks, rental income, 401k contributions, and 401k matches
• taxes and health insurance are not depicted

[ToeInTheWater]

very nice!  love the visual!
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[Need2Save]

Very colorful.  Those Annual Bonus months sure look sweet!  Your travel also spikes nearly the same time each year.  Is that intentional?

[meghan88]

Very cool ... love those annual bonuses.  Wondering about the Mortgage Utilities Transport spikes.  Do the spikes represent extra mortgage payments?

[MostlyBearded]

Did you eat mostly gold-plated caviar in Oct'15 ;)

[welliamwallace]

Answering some questions:

-Food Expenses in Oct 2015: That was my wedding day! Included $400 of catering :-)
-Spikes in "Mortgage / Utilities / Transport": Extra mtg payments actually fall under the "savings" category. So these spikes are mostly due to car repairs and the fact that my water and sewer bills come quarterly (and on the same month)
-Travel spikes coinciding with annual bonuses is actually coincidence!

[SynapticFits]

This looks fantastic! I'd love to do this myself. Was this just done in vanilla Excel? I use Excel like crazy but I don't graph much.

[Captain FIRE]

the 401k looks mostly consistent.  For ease of reading the chart, you might consider putting that on the bottom.  I recognize it's discretionary, but it gets hard to read with the travel and other spending spikes, and it's more regular like mortgage.  Could still keep it green to signify "money saved".

[welliamwallace]

Captian FIRE, I thought a lot about that. I know it will look better with the least "spiky" category on the bottom, but I wanted to keep the green together. It's easy to switch around for myself in Excel though!

 SynapticFits Yes, done in vanilla excel, it's called a "stacked area chart".

[21runner]

SynapticFits Yes, done in vanilla excel, it's called a "stacked area chart".

Wow, awesome graph! I've never noticed that option in excel, I'll have to try that myself. Thanks for posting!