I bank with Wells Fargo. I just noticed that they do spending reports for you, both on a yearly and monthly basis, breaking your spending habits into 19 categories. Here’s how I fared in each category… with a few meta-categories that I added as well.

Airlines/Transportation: 0%
This number is wrong since I usually put plane tickets on my credit card. Unfortunately, American Express’s Yearly Report is still showing data from 2004 instead of 2005.

Auto/Gas: 0.2%
This just had gas and insurance charges up until June, when I sold my car.

Bills: 2.3%
This is for various utilities, tickets, and bills paid online with Yahoo Bill Pay. It doesn’t count credit card bills though.

Building Supply/Wholesale: 0.1%
Almost nothing spent on tools and hardware stuff. Most of this went into fixing my shower in October.

Charity/Community: 0.1%
I barely give to charity at the moment. Started donating to the Clean Air Act people in August with a friend. Yup, I’m an uncharitable bastard. Will fix this perhaps, now that I’m trying to care about these things.

Contractor/Business Services: 0.5%
It looks like all of my online web hosting and internet stuff goes into this category. That, and mailing things at the post office.

Entertainment: 0.8%
Watching movies in a theater, plays, going to the zoo, and museum admission goes into this category. Quite a few charges, but since they’re all so cheap it doesn’t add up to much.

Groceries: 1.6%
Obviously not a big shopper at the grocery store. I went to the grocery store about 65 times, but the average amount spent is close to $20… which I think means I was usually buying wine, breakfast bars, and maybe limes.

Health Care/Pharmacy: 0.1%
Vitamins!

Household: 0.9%
This is grossly understated, since I put all of my big furniture expenses on the credit card. I’d guess it’s closer to 7 or 8% of total expenses… mostly in the form of kitchen table, chairs, curtains, and lamp.

Lodging: 0%
A few nights in a couple hotels… doesn’t add up to much.

Mortgage and Condo Fees: 23.1%
A good chunk spent on a roof over my head.

Office Supply/Stationary: 0%
Looks like I bought some blank CDs at Office Depot in February.

Personal Services: 0.1%
Haircuts!

Pet/Veterinary: 0%
This makes sense, since I don’t have a pet.

Restaurants: 17%
This is the doozy. In a year with only 365 days, I managed to rake up 385 restaurant charges. It would be interesting to group and sort them by most frequently visited, most money spent, etc. It can all be done in Excel, I suppose, but I don’t have the will to at the moment.

Retail/Department Stores: 3.4%
Clothes, books, movie rentals, and miscellaneous online purchases. Biggest purchases include a couple trips to the Apple Store, and a few new shirts.

Savings: 10.1%
Just realized that I was including transfers into savings in the total money spent.

Utilities/Telecom: 0%
Doesn’t look like they’re properly categorizing my cell phone bill. I’d suspect that this is actually close to 1% of my spending.

ATM withdrawals: 9.4%
That mysterious black hole filled with americanos, taxi cabs, and happy hour drinks.

Uncategorized Credit Card Bills: 30.5%
Oh well. That’s a big chunk of uncategorized spending… maybe American Express will update the yearly spending summary soon so we can factor this stuff in.

Conclusions:

Okay, this was a fairly unsatisfying exercise. The amount of unknown spending that is happening in my life is pretty high, and until I can figure out where the other 50% of my money is going, I’m not sure how helpful the Wells Fargo summary will be.

One obvious conclusion, however, is that restaurants are staying in business largely because of me. And, that there are a lot of empty categories that I’m guessing other people spend money in that I do not: auto, groceries, insurance, pet, maybe utilities.

Looking at this, I wonder how much more satisfaction and caring I can squeeze out of my financial situation. Manually categorizing each purchase for a year seems like a sentence worse than death, especially if it only confirms that yes, I eat out a lot.

I would like to know, roughly, whether or not I spend more money on restaurants than other people spend on groceries. Which lifestyle is, ultimately, cheaper?