I saw such a chart recently on this reddit and I decided to go through our family finances to see where our money went. It took me some time but I should have most of it included. We also wanted to share this to get A) feedback in case someone spots something that could be "optimised" and B) to provide an example of how our income is being spent. I am honestly unable to tell where we are in terms of earners in Ireland. Looking at some other families we feel like we are not high earners. We also don't drive the newest car or own the newest phone. Then reading the average income of a family, we are classed as high-income earners. Interesting how the perspective and feeling clash a little there.
I also took a few things with me while gathering the data for the chart:
> It was very interesting to go through the incoming and outgoings from my family. We were running generally a good overview of incoming/outgoings on a calculation based on monthly NET income, so the annualization within the chart gave us a great picture of what is left from our anual gross salary.
> Childcare: We actually pay way more than we anticipated for childcare. We have two kids, one of them being in part-time creche, the other needing a childminder as the baby is not yet in the age for the creche. Most are saying, paying for childcare is like paying a second mortgage, but this is more than we expected to see.
Feel free to share thoughts on what you think and perhaps if you want to share any other feedback.
Make no bones about it, you're far beyond average household income and are certainly high income earners. We are a family of 5 on less with similar mortgage and childcare and even I know I'm still better than most.
Pension seems low. Consider stocks being repurposed to max them out. Leaving money on the table for your future there I think. What's the distinction between pension and employee matching out of interest?
Childcare seems a tad high. Probably the childminder. Ours got somewhat more manageable when both in creche with ECCE and NCS.
Food is certainly high. You have two small kids, one very young and are spending a grand a month and 100 on take away. I track religiously and YNAB tells me my swing for food is 550-700pcm and I've also got an older kid on top.
Interested in the value of those investments. Two Zurich child policies too I guess. I'm on record about how I think about those on here (I think better value can be found investing elsewhere e.g ETFs and there are enough transfer opportunies to work around the CAT allowances). Curious about the managed portfolio and investment #1, any details?
Credit card debts on this income while saving 5100/year and investing seems wild too. I'd sort that out, no need for it.
Potential mistakes: * Internet is weird? Reimbursement income is €1300 but expenditure on it is far less * No car fuel costs, but the motorbike fuel was there
Not sure food is high, checked revolut. 22k on groceries. We have a problem
Looking at those numbers I kind of hope you do 😅 I expect my own food bill to go up considerably when they really start growing up - ages 5-18 basically. But for current and OPs ages the major of the food bill has to be the adults, like ours is, and 700 would be a real bad month!
JFC. Checked again, €9.8k on groceries..phew
I forgot to split this a bit further up. We have pets and the "food" part includes pet food and requirements, like cat litter etc - and the occassional middle isle items from Lidl/Aldi.
Our weekly shopping comes usually in at around 110-130e/week - purely grocceries.
Thanks for the observation.
These are actually interesting points.
Pension is currently set to gain the most benefit from the employer, e.g. 7% pension contribution with 7% matched by the employer. It's a good thought, as we are putting a lot aside for investments, be it child future or ours. Especially ours can be redistributed into pension contribution instead. Thanks for the thought.
Car is electric and mostly covered in the electricity costs, hence it's not entered as an extra point
Internet is being reimbursed from both companies (my wife receives a default amount per month, whereas I can claim the full amount of the bill, hence it's the reimbursement is higher).
We are looking forward being able to use the ECCE and NCS, as currently only NCS applies to us due to the childs ages. The childminder is definitely the higher cost for us here - even though we are very lucky with her and we know that.
On pension it seems like the graph could be wrong then? I think you should either include work's contribution as gross income or put their contribution directly to pension. Right now it looks to me like out of your own gross you're dropping in €27k but that's not what you're saying here. Tell me if I'm reading that wrong
For contrast I am nailing pension, max for my age. Employer on top is just cherries. I won't let up unless I absolutely must. These earlier years are the best for growth thus they are the most important by far, also the kids are still cheap enough. When they start wanting a Playstation 8 or Nintendo Switch 5 and brand name clothes I might have to dial it back but by then I will have built up a large fund so I can probably reduce and live a bit. You're presumably in or around the same age bracket so something to think about.
As long as it's legit the same internet bill reimbursed twice is a nice benefit to have!
Fair play on renting a room. Even if it is a granny flat. I have a room and I could not do it
Oh thanks, I see your point with the Pension :facepalm:, I didn't spot it. It's currently 10% of mine and 7% from my wifes income.
We have a huge potential upwards in regards to the pension contribution as you can see on the figured above, so that's a very good point. Also the fact with future "child costs" when these things come into play - which we haven't had in mind.
Renting out a room is definitely somethings we had to talk over a few times and won't be a long term solution for us. Luckily it should only bridge the childminder costs as long as we have them.
Great. You're going the right way about it, few tweaks and considerations around priorities and you'll be set. I hope you feel more like the numbers suggest you should soon regarding income but you do need to run your own race too. Thanks for sharing and best of luck with it
How’s the dynamic of renting a room while also having a family home? Seems odd but maybe it’s a granny flat?
What’s the weekend allowance, how is that income?
There are challenges at times where timings clash or situations arise that would'nt be there otherwise. However, we were lucky with the person moving in and she's very lovely and understanding, especially with two kids in the house :)
I work every few weekends, which is extra paid by my employer as weekend allowances. This is not always there and not part of my base pay, hence why I listed it separately.
Gas and electricity can't be right.
We have a PV system on the roof, which covers most of our electricity needs, hence electricity is not high in our bills.
I take it the car is an EV?
Has to be, and has to be doing the vast majority of transport for kids and two adults. Between that and their mortgage, the electricity bill is a god send.
We don't have a PV and pay less than that :-)
Every year when I switch providers I'm shocked what is considered the "normal" or "standard" electricity bill in this country... It's usually double what we actually pay...
Just paid €600 gas bill for 2 months.
It's been cold the last couple of weeks but that seems like a huge amount.. what are your thermostats and tank temperatures set at and how often is the heating and water on?
Full blast🤣
Fair play feen came clean hahaha
The average home uses 4200kwh annually. We use 4000 in ours, consistent the past 3 years. Smart meter but not on a smart plan. Assuming 25c ex vat per unit, minimum bill is 1130 inc VAT. That's not including the near 300 quid standing charge and levies.
You must be on a smart plan and optimising your time of day or using considerably less than average to be seeing prices like this.
Depends on what year OP is currently living in.
Vacations?
We usually have 1-2 vacations which we spent in countries we have families, so we use part of the savings to pay for flights, etc.
Thanks for sharing! My only thought would be to potentially increase your charity donation to €250. That would then meet the threshold for them to gain tax back and effectively turning your donation into €362 for them.
https://www.revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs-and-exemptions/donations-and-covenants/charitable-donations/index.aspx
Oh I did not know that, thank you for the information. That's a very good reason to increase it, especially as they can get more our from it and the monthly payments aren't much higher.
This is one of the best looking sankey diagrams I've seen. Which website did you use for this?
You are high earners. Can I ask out of curiosity, I assume one of you is in tech but is the other in a government job?
I'll agree with the other comments, pension seems very low. Make sure you're maxing that first before considering those Zurich investments as you'll get a greater tax benefit from the pension.
The debts piece is weird to me. Are these credit cards you're trying to clear or what's happening here? If so, stop with the Zurich investments or use the leftover and clear the debt
I've used https://sankeymatic.com to build the diagram. It was our first time after seeing it on another post.
Indeed, we are actually both in tech. However, I have a more technical background than my wife and therefore in a different role than her, hence the difference.
The two child investments are long-term investments to use the yearly tax-free gifting threshold, which will benefit them in the long term and "hopefully" set them up for a good start once they are 19/20.
However, for the other investments this is a very interesting thought as it has not crossed our minds. We were so focussed on setting up investments for our future (possibly before pension age), that we forgot the tax benefit of pension contributions. Thanks for that!
The Credit card piece is the yearly government stamp duty for our credit cards. It's marginal but 100% reoccurring unless we cancel the credit cards. The other debt is a low interest loan. I did play with the thought of paying it off early, but wasn't sure yet regarding the missed compounding effect of the investments that would be missed.
If you have a nest egg built up in savings (3-6 months expenses) and still have 14k leftovers, id clear that low interest loan. That frees up a large amount of money.
As for pension and investments. Have a look at https://www.revenue.ie/en/jobs-and-pensions/pension/relief/tax-relief-limits.aspx
I don't know what ages you both are, but if you are between 30-39 you can contribute up to 20% to your pension up to a maximum of 115k, and this will give you a huge tax benefit. You and your wife could both do this. This also does not include any employer contribution, so that 20% is just what you contribute. Purely from the fees and non-tax benefit, unless you want to be able to access the money before retirement I would forget about the Zurich investments and go all in on the pension. Keep the child investments if you want. I have a personal dislike to those child investments but each to their own.
Thanks for sharing that, we do have indeed a good bit free towards the threshold limits which we will definitely look into to take more advantages of the non-tax benefit.
May I ask you what the dislike to those child investments are? I'm very eager to hear different sides and experiences about these.
My dislike about them is generally they are trusts that become the legal property of the child when they turn 18. If invested right these could be worth thousands. I don't like the idea of giving an 18 year old access to thousands, especially when you don't know who they'll be or what they'll be doing at that age. I also think Zurich charge ridiculous fees
My approach to investing for my child is I'm putting their child benefit into an ETF, specifically VWCE. I'll probably up this when I have the funds to do so. While the investment is in my name my plan will be to sell portions of this after they turn 18 and gift them the 3k per year as and when they need it. It's sort of the same approach, but just operates slightly differently and I retain control of the money and can release money to my kid as I see fit
What platform are you using to invest child benefit?
I just use Revolut as I only make one trade a month. Most people recommend trading 212
You can give the kids €3k per parent which is 6k per year if you have the savings to do so. We've been doing that the last 3 years.
What's "weekend allowance" in this context?
I work every few weekends, which is extra paid by my employer as weekend allowances. This is not always there and not part of my base pay, hence why I listed it separately.
I am the poorest person in this sub
You have dental insurance but not health insurance? Or do you have health insurance paid by your employer?
Yes, health insurance is paid by the employer as benefit (or BIK).
How do you rent a room with a family of four?
We live in a 4 bedroom house and did some sacrafices in terms of room usage, storage and availability of a guest room for visitors. We provide our main bath to the person renting the room and we use the on-suit mostly. However, this will only be a temporary measurement in order to counter the childcare costs as we will need the room in a year or two.
How do you get that much for Internet Reimbursement?
I want that too.
I suppose we are quite lucky that both our employers are reimbursing internet. My wife receives a fixed amount every month without the requirement of a bill and my employer covers the full bill up to a certain amount.
Oh, that's nice.
My company used to reimburse the internet & phone bill until 2023 (if I'm not mistaken).
If I'm reading your chart right it looks like the below;
€27k into pension
€15k in debt paid off
€5k into savings
€14k into investments
and €14k leftover
Increasing wealth by about €75k a year, excluding any asset growth? Some going
Hey, the chart represents where money will be going this year.
So the debt for example is the outstanding debt we have and where monthly payment's are going.
27k pension is the combined contribution (our contribution and the employers match). I actually need to adjust this as I see that this can be easily misread. Thanks for point this out.
The left-overs are covering any other smaller costs that are not necessarily scheduled, like clothes, smaller repairs or maintainance, etc etc.
Not paying into pension is leaving money on the floor (it’s like a bike to work scheme for pension savings)
All that income and you're still watching football on a dodgy box. Gotta respect it.
Crazy money for childcare, food, subscriptions, leftovers, investments. Definitely high earners. Once theyre n school look how much money you'll be investing. That's not a normal amount btw. Normal people are barely surviving.
Is the 14k "credit" debt an historic debt that needed to paid off or just monthly credit card bills? If just a credit card bill then it should be itemised into the correct category ideally.
Comparing it to me your childcare is very high, however I don't see any holidays, weddings, gifts, christmas presents, clothes, concert tickets, medical costs, kids activities / lessons. Thats the kind of stuff for me that adds up.
Unpopular opinion from an engineering professional: Sankeys provide no additional insight compared to an itemized table, and take up more space.
Its true, but there is something so satisfying about the depiction of income and expenditure as a flow. No additional insight, but very clear depiction of what's happening.
Interesting to see, thanks for sharing! Did you leave out clothes / toys / baby things? I imagine all that adds up.
They do actually add up, you are right.
We have considered these as part of the "Left-Over" section as these costs vary quite often. Most things like toys, often clothes or furnitures are collected from Parents recycling groups where they go again once our ones out-grow them.
How are you making these graphs?
I made this one via https://sankeymatic.com
Thanks a mill
Is renting a room really worth it? 9k out of 117k take home? Just a thought, with small kids it wouldn't be for me!
You spend $26k on childcare? WTF?
Yes we do indeed. As we are both working full time, this is something we have to pay. There are no creche places for kids under 2, hence the requirement of a childminder and the associated cost. We were also surprised by that.
22k on childcare, have you considered an Aupair?
We did have an Aupair in mind at the beginning. However, when you provide a room, you have to still pay them minimum wage which would result in having a room less in the house and still have to pay a huge amount. This way we recoup a little bit of the cost via renting out a room tax free.
I like the level of detail. Did it take you long?
It took me a few hours to gather everything and put it into the graph. To be honest, once you have the data, putting it in the graph is relatively quick.
Thank you for sharing, I may look at mine and compare. There is an interesting source of data out there in the Household Budget Survey.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-hbs/householdbudgetsurvey2022-2023/resultsandanalysis/
I considered organising my budget to follow it but I don't think it's ideal. It's good that it has a place for everything but too much stuff falls under miscellaneous in my option. Using it would allow you to compare to average for family size.
While it's only about spending it certainly gives an idea of what people might be earning. I think the average earnings can be swayed by people in very different situations such as students or pensioners.
I'm jealous of your ability to make this graph.. I use revolut for tonnes of transactions but AIB is still main account, so it's a mess. I've exported all my spending for a year and am digging in to try make sense of the transactions across banks etc. this is super detailed so seems worth it. Good job!
I’m amazed that so little goes to savings. I understand you’ve expenses but should the jobs go tits up you’re only saving at a rate of 1/20th or less of the spend so it wouldn’t keep you going for any real length of time
Where do you put together a chart like this?
https://sankeymatic.com here :)
Impressive level of savings/ investments/ leftovers here, considering the amounts going out on mortgage, childcare and debt repayments, before you even start with general living expenses for a family of four. I have a similar net income (slightly less - 108k), with a family of five, and managed to end up with precisely nothing left over last year! Don't think we live an extravagant lifestyle, but defo doing something wrong....will do one of these diagrams to compare.
It's interesting indeed. We also got to question ourselves as to where the money went due to it being gone at the end of the month. This was one of the motivations for me to do the graph to visualize this and get an understanding of it while going through the expenses.
We alos don't live an extravagant lifestyle and watching other neighbours/families how they are doing felt like they must be earning way more. But then again, you never know the details. So this gave us a good idea of it as it showed us that we have different priorities than the families we saw. We didn't need the newest things and we didn't go on life-changing vacations but focussed more on improving our live and starting already to invest/save for the kids.
We haven't had much left at the end of the year. The "Left-over" is eaten up by non-regular expenses like clothing, smaller maintainance and repairs, the occassional coffee etc
Tbh looks like a fair bit being pissed away here. Internet, streaming services, food to name a few
Yes, it looks a bit there indeed.
Interent is that high as it's needed as we are working from home mostly and the employer covers the internet costs, hence we don't mind that much about it.
Food is also covering pet food and the middle isle items from Lidl/Aldi at some times, hence why we calculate that amount as it does add up. Our weekly Lidl shopping comes to 110+ alone, not counting in pet food and requirements etc.
The streaming services... well, yeah that's true and that is one of the things we actually became aware after seeing this as the monthly costs weren't that "high"" given that some are yearly payments and not always on the radar.
Your child 1 and 2 investments. Shouldn't you up these by 3k each to the 6k?
In order to avail of the full tax benefit, yes. To do this, we would need to reduce other investments until the childcare costs come a bit down. The plan is to increase the child investments once that happens.
Oh my God I can't believe I'm saying this (because I'm not Ned) but it's supposed to be paid within 6mths of the tax year its for to be allowed ongoing tax free
I'm gonna go jump out a window now
Are you child 1 or 2? 😅
Could definitely see a few spots that have room for savings. Why is the garbage so high? We’re with Greenstar and pay €180 a year for all 3 bins. You’re triple paying for music streaming services, you have Apple Music, Amazon Prime which gives you music and Spotify. IMO look at Apple One family subscription which will give you cloud storage for the whole family, Apple Music and Apple TV, and cut Spotify.
Lose the credit cars. It's madness to be paying those fees when you're raking in 200,000 euros.
I'd also want to be investing more with that take home.
Great potential to donate more.
Is there an app that can do this chart and tracking for you? Seems intresting
You can def cut down on your entertainment by alternating streaming services every month. Also delete your music services and buy a radio.
Cool graph though.