Grocery Spending by Income Group

The BLS CEX has data on average spending in food categories covering grocery spending and spending on eating out.   They have tables that break the data down by income groups.  The data here is from 2011.

First we can see the amounts that people spend on eating at home and eating out based on income groups :

Click image for full size

I also thought it would be interesting to see what percent of the grocery budget for food eaten at home goes to different types of foods.   For example : Do poor people eat more carbos and less veggies as a portion of their entire grocery budget?   Or do rich people spend more of their budget on steaks and fancy cheeses? 

I found it interesting that there is fairly little variation in the percent of the grocery budget that goes to each category across income groups.   The differences in % of total budget spent across income groups varies only 1-3%.    For example every income group spends 9-10% of their grocery dollars on nonalcoholic beverages.   Now of course we can see from the first chart that peoples spending on groceries goes up with income.  However the portions spent in each aisle of the grocery store seems to stay fairly consistent no matter how much you make.   So poor people and rich people spend about 10% of their grocery money in the beverage aisle, 22% in the meat section, 11% on dairy, etc.


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Finances of Landlords as Gleaned from 2009 IRS Data

The IRS has data for which returns claimed rental income or losses.   I got the info from the IRS taxstats pages and specifically here the 2009 figures in MS Excel .   This gives us an easy way to see how many landlords there are, how many of them made money and what their adjusted gross incomes were.   Let get some details out of the way, first this is just for the year 2009 and situations change somewhat year to year.   Second this is just from the individual income tax returns so its based on tax figures and individuals so it doesn't capture corporations who own apartment complexes or similar businesses that wouldn't file individual income taxes.

We had about 9.8 million individual landlords in the nation which I conclude from just over 9.8 million tax filers showing rental income gains or losses.

Around 7% of people are landlords.    There were around 140 million tax filers and 9.8 million claiming rental income so that equates to about 7%.

A majority of landlords lost money (on paper at least).   5.72 million or 58% of the landlords showed loses from their rentals on their tax forms.   4.15 million landlords, 42%, had gains from their rentals.

Most landlords aren't in high income brackets.   Median gross income for landlords is between  $50,000  to $75,000.   70% of landlords had income under $100,000 and 42% of landlords had under $50,000 in AGI.

Now lets look at some charts.

That one shows the total number of landlords in each AGI bracket.

Grouping it into some bigger buckets here we get:

There is more money flowing into (and out of ) the hands of landlords who are in the higher AGI brackets.   Looking at net gain/loss per income level we get :

Note : I wouldn't make too much about the gains versus losses here as this is only the taxable numbers.   We're talking about Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) and gains or losses claimed on your taxes so this is not the same as cash flow and it includes 'paper losses' such as depreciation.   In other words a landlord may show a loss on their tax forms due to depreciation and other deductions but actually come out ahead.   Thats not uncommon given the large depreciation deduction.   Also the rental loses may push a landlords total income into the loss category which is seen with a large spike of landlords who have rental losses and no taxable income.


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Best of Blogs for Week of February 22nd

Every Friday afternoon I share some of the more interesting or notable posts that I have seen in the personal finance blogs and other sources for the past week

DQYDJ answers the question Where’s the Inflation?

RetireBy40 thinks Traveling is more fun when you are young

DoughRoller lists 10 Tablet Apps That Manage Your Money

JCollins discusses Social Security: How secure and when to take it

fivecentnickel  asks Just How Tough is Today’s Economy?

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About 60% of People are Paid Hourly

This is a pretty short post but I wanted to capture this fact.   A while ago I was trying in vain to find some data about what percentage of people are paid hourly and how many are paid salary.   I stumbled into the number on a BLS site.

At :  Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2011 they say :

"In 2011, 73.9 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.1 percent of all wage and salary workers."

There you go, 59.1% of people are paid hourly wages.   That means therefore that 40.9% are paid salary.   They exclude people who are self employed.


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