Year-End Accounting
So I’ve been doing my year-end accounting runs today. All in all it was a decent enough year, showing a healthy profit over the year previous. In my reporting, though, I’ve discovered some disturbing facts. The most disturbing is that my single largest expense item is federal income tax. I pay $691/month for the services of the federal government: more than I spend on myself, more than I spend on mortgage interest, more than I spend on my home, more than I spend on food. While the aforesaid federal government does provide some very useful services (it has done an excellent job keeping out the Canadian government & army and the Mexican government, rather a less good job keeping out the Mexican army and individual Mexicans), it seems strange to me that these services should be so expensive.
Then there’s the asinine Social Security programme. I have been paying $351/month into that money pit. What really hurts is that if I had even half that to invest on the market I should be in a considerably better financial position in a decade. Thanks, Uncle Sam! With the Democrats in power, don’t expect this to improve at all. Thanks, Republicans!
I discovered that this past year I’ve been somewhat more frugal than in ’05; my personal expenditures have been reduced about 9% and have gone from the most expensive item to the second-most expensive. This is pretty good, although it could be better.
My mortgage interest has decreased about 30¢/month. This is pretty annoying, but that’s life. It beats annually-increasing rent for certain—and once inflation is taken into account, it is a decent decrease.
An unfortunate item is that my household expenses have increased nearly 18%, due mainly to some purchases of kitchen tools which I wrote off as expenses instead of depreciating over time. I’ll have to keep an eye out on this sort of thing in the future.
Another bit of good news is that I’ve managed to knock my food expenditure down by over 9%. I need to crunch the numbers further to discern if this is due to eating out less, or to starting to purchase groceries at Wal-Mart vs. Albertson’s & Costco. Still, it’s welcome to see.
The final numbers show that total expenses went up 1.64% from 2005 to 2006. This is not bad, and is probably less than inflation. Now if I can only hold it down next year…
