Where the Plastic Money Went

Our Bank, PNC, provides an annual summation of charges made to our principal credit card. We only use one. We charge most everything to it that we buy outside—never mind small and very incidental purchases like the occasional ice cream in summer and the like.

Here is where at least some of our money, the plastic kind, went this year:

Category	%
Media	27.3
Groceries	25.1
Merch./Retail	20.4
Moving Expense	15.5
Insurance	4.3
Restaurants	3.7
Gas	3.0
Health	0.7

Total expenditures include two other major categories. One of these are direct payments by our bank to designated accounts:

·         Utilities

·         Extra health and pharmaceutical insurance.

The other is checks that we write. We write fewer and fewer, but some of these are often significant in size:

·         Charities

·         Repairs

·         Special jobs like lawn repair, guttering, etc.

The percentage breakdown is for on-going expenses. We note with some raised eyebrows that we pay more for media—including telephone, newspapers, magazines, cable television, Netflix, and Internet—than we pay for food! Always suspected something like that.

A note or two. A special expense in 2014 was the actual physical move we made in July. With that absent, the Media percentile would be higher. Health is low—but only because we don’t use a credit card to pay for it--and Medicare does most of it. Gas is low as well, but that’s because we buy most of our gas at Costco, and Costco expenditures are listed under groceries.

Yes. Those media. This posting today inspired by news to the effect that a portion of Arizona lost all Internet service because somebody found and severed a major carrier line buried deep in mountainous territory. All sorts of devices went down, not least ATM machines where we draw out cash when we need it.