It's always interesting to us to see how other data visualists who draw from the same data sources we do go about developing and presenting their own visualizations of that data.
In October 2024, we featured several visualizations drawn from the Consumer Expenditure Survey about a month after the data had just been published. That data represents how American households spent money in 2023 and our approach was to break that spending down into major categories and explore how that spending has evolved over the past 40 years.
About three months later, Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufield and Sabrina Lam visited the same data source, but chose to focus on just 2023 itself. They used the data to create an infographic showing how much and on what the average American household spent their money on during that year. Here's their visualization:
Since we just covered where the total compensation earned by the average American in December 2024 comes from, we thought this graphic made for a nice companion feature because it shows a good part of what Americans do with their take-home compensation. That assumes the relative share of what Americans spend on each category it shows hasn't much changed from 2023 to 2024.
The Consumer Expenditure Survey showing how Americans spent money in 2024 won't be available until sometime in September 2025, so we won't be able to properly match the spending of American households in 2024 with the average total compensation of an individual American in 2024 until then.
Reference
Dorothy Neufeld and Sabrina Lam. Visualizing How Americans Spend Their Money? [Online article]. Visual Capitalist. 26 January 2025.
Labels: data visualization
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