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How Do Your Finances Compare to the Average LearnVester’s?

Allison Kade
Allison Kade
Posted on May 11, 2012

At LearnVest, we know you’re one-of-a-kind.

You’re a beautiful, unique snowflake (yes, even in the summertime!) whose financial situation—and life goals—aren’t exactly like anyone else’s.

It’s why we profile readers like Victoria, who knew nothing about money growing up, and grew up to become a master investor. And Carla, who got so good at living on a budget and saving up—$10,000 in three years—she went back to school to become a Certified Financial Planner.

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It’s also why LearnVest’s My Money Center allows you to connect all your financial accounts, like your credit card, savings account and student loans, in one place and group your transactions into spending and saving categories to help you track where you spend (or save) every dollar. But our favorite part is that you can name the folders yourself, so if you want to call a folder “Katie’s Big, Audacious Trip to Buenos Aires” or “Things I Shouldn’t Have Bought,” you can.

We will never reveal any of your personal info (nor do we have access to it), but we do know the broad spending patterns among our members.

To remind you how unique each of you is—and, at the same time, how universal many of our financial goals are—we created an infographic with the average LearnVester’s spending. This data comes from members who labeled their transactions accordingly, but we think it paints an interesting picture of what LearnVest readers spend on, save for and care about.

How do you compare?

What's New

  • Mara

    Interesting, but these numbers don’t seem to make sense!  Average expenses are way too high for the average income.  

    • amkade

      Hi Mara,

      Glad you liked the story! These numbers are aggregated from thousands of members; what you’re noticing is that not every member uses every folder (it’s customize-able, so one person isn’t necessarily a pet-owner and a cigarette smoker and giving to charity and paying $160 for the gym all at once — those are averages for each category of the people who DO use those folders).

      That said, if you’re noticing that the spending outweighs the income, there’s a very real possibility that many people in the LV community are spending more than they make and going into credit card debt. Obviously, that’s not something we recommend–but it does show how easy it is to fall into the trap of spending more than we should! 

      For anyone reading this comment who struggles with that very issue, know that we have resources to help you. Namely, our free, 15-day Get Out of Debt Bootcamp: http://www.learnvest.com/how-lv-works/bootcamps/get-out-of-debt/

      Hope that clears things up!

      Best,
      Allison

  • http://twitter.com/MosedaleConsult Mosedale Consulting

    Like Mara I’m somewhat thrown by the numbers and I wish we could have a further breakdown on what exactly consitutes a loan/creditcard payment – are people actually paying down debt or just rolling it on a monthly basis?

    Is it because those just starting out are borrowing like mad just to pay rent & bills – or is it that those 10 years down the line who are now earning decent money are able to pay it down?

    The “average savings” is worrying – but very telling of the times.

  • Grace

    Okay, so obviously LV is not a research unit or anything, but these numbers are totally taken out of context. Your population sample probably has everyone from student to retiring shortly in it, so these numbers don’t really help individual readers. What we really need to know is if our spending is high or low relative to someone else in our similar situation – or at least the same age, education level, and geographical region (urban / rural). This takes all of that away.

  • JackieAU5

    Whoa, I guess I’m doing better in the savings department than most of my LearnVest friends.  Thanks, you made me feel a little better today.

  • Alexis Greenwood

    The picture is very inaccurate because it doesn’t reflect the true breakdown of costs. Is the $1,118 credit card payment from old debt, or does it include expenses from the month in question? I bet there’s a lot of food, clothing, alcohol, and other purchases hiding in that “$1118″.

  • Jenna

    @twitter-545383211:disqus made a good point about it being hard to tell whether a loan payment is what you have to pay, or if it’s extra. It sounds like this is based on how people label their transactions, so there’s probably no way to break out “required” versus “additional.”

    I also had a similar thought on the credit card side and the top comment on the infographic. Having a high credit card payment isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example, I put almost all of my spending on my credit card, so it’s very likely that half of my expenses are on my credit card, but I pay it off each month. In that case my credit card payment is more like a transfer between accounts, but you can’t really distinguish that from making extra payments to pay down a debt.

    Speaking of transfers, I wonder if that’s affecting both the low savings number and the low sample size — that most people’s savings transactions are labeled “transfer” and are just netting $0 between the “in” and the “out” part. I don’t use LV’s money center, so I don’t know how it works, but all of my savings transactions in Mint are transfers. I don’t relabel them “savings.”

    Overall, some interesting stats, but maybe not displayed in the most useful way.

  • Nikki B

    This totally is very accurate! I probably pay just over a little over $600 in credit card payments a month!

  • Kgal1298

    My loans are required otherwise I would find a way out of that one haha I hate student loans. When you take into account required would be gas, electric, housing, food and personal care things like shampoo and conditioner unless you dirty in which case you could save a ton. The extra is most likely going out and gifts and travel, but still it should be an article on how much average people spend on required materials. I feel like things like rent could be adjusted because a lot of people over spend on nice places. For example I only pay 15% of my income on rent, but then more about 20% is going towards my loans like student and care and then there is a good 20% for other bills leaving me about 45% to save, but that never happens T_T mainly because of unexpected costs like medical and such or moving if you move. 

  • ranavain

     How on earth are only 237 people on LearnVest tracking their “rent?” Is home ownership (aka mortgage) really that much more common then renting? I would think that anyone using a budgeting tool would at least be tracking either rent or a mortgage. And I do take comfort in having an almost exactly average rent payment, despite having an apparently higher than average income (among LearnVesters, who I would have assumed generally make more than I do). Ego boost for the day!