Where We Spend Our Money
How we've spent quite a lot of money since about 1996. Because we run our house
out of a single bank account, and have done since about 1994, we have a very good history of how we
spend our money.
In the database is 34,500 transactions, starting
12/2/1996
and the latest 10/06/2026
Petrol
On first reflection, this seems like a huge amount of money, and it is of course, but simplistically (not taking into account inflation etc) it's only about $4,335 a year or $360 a month to run 2 cars. Bring on EVs!
Z should be sending us a Christmas card every year though
Note the fascinating spend gap for April 2020 when NZ went into lockdown the first time where our only purchase at a service station was a bottle of milk
The gap in late 2004 was when we were briefly livng in Madison, WI, USA.
For the record, the first petrol purchase was on 12/2/1996
Supermarkets
Our total supermarket spend is not entirely accurate for various reasons, but it's still interesting to compare where we spend the money.
Despite this data not including every time we've ever been to the supermarket, the total visits we do have is 3,945 times Gabba has walked into a supermarket, or on average once every 2.45 days. If I was to guess, the average would be much closer to 1.
The Warehouse
At one point it seemed we were in The Warehouse almost every weekend and then suddenly it occured to me that it was bloody ages since I was last there. I assume it's because we stopped buying stuff for the kids. The chart below shows our The Warehouse purchase history $ spend by month. Amusingly the last few years we are shopping at The Warehouse, again for the kids but this time buying stuff for them to move out into places of their own.
If I was to guess, our spend at McDonalds would possibly follow a similar track. One day I will find out.
The Hardware Stores
We bought our house in January 2010. Which is about exactly when the chart below shows a marked increase in our spending at Hardware stores. Conveniently or not, we live only 800m from a Bunnings. We have been to Bunnings Constellation 399 times.
Through late 2014 to about mid 2016 we did some landscaping at home and so for a small period we spent money at our local Placemakers. When that project was over, we've barely been back.
KFC
KFC isn't our favourite, apparently, having only purchased there 21 times in the last 28 years and only once in the last 8.
McDonald's & Burger King
The hypothesis: as the kids grew up there was a bulge of McDonald's visits that then disappears. The chart below shows visit counts by month — not dollars spent, just how many times we walked through the door.