Looking back at 2016 I wondered, where did all the money go? I looked at various collections of what people spend money on, including the CPI and the typical American strip mall. Here are all the things I could think of that people, apparently, spend money on which I spent nothing on in 2016. Zero.

  • mortgage interest, car loan, payday loan, interest of any kind

  • legal, funerary, financial planning, tax preparation services

  • banking, ATM, credit card fees

  • brokerage fees, real estate commission

  • complex non-obligatory financial products, including optional insurances

  • motor vehicles (though still amortizing a 2013 car), tires

  • vehicle repair, oil change labor

  • parking, taxis, car sharing/rental

  • alcohol, bars/taverns/pubs

  • tobacco, vaping/smoking paraphernalia

  • street drugs, marijuana legal or otherwise

  • lottery, gambling, casino, dog/horse track

  • pornography, prostitution, massage, escort

  • religious donations, relics, tithes, televangelists, gurus, fortune telling

  • pharmaceutical company products

  • vitamins/supplements, pills or OTC health products of any kind

  • medical care, eyeglasses, hospital/ER services

  • operating systems & software (excluding games), licenses, apps, SaaS

  • mobile electronics, watches

  • tablet, ereader, iot/smart device, computers of any kind

  • printers/ink, 3d printing

  • bicycles & components & accessories (truly? seems so!)

  • artwork, art supplies

  • satellite or cable television service

  • monitors, projectors, televisions, cameras, audio equipment

  • music CDs, iTunes

  • streaming audio/video/ebook, pay-per-view anything

  • on-line gaming services (I actually gold farmed a $130 credit)

  • tools, outdoor equipment

  • guns, weapons, knives

  • paint/painting, gardening, plumbing, repair services (directly)

  • pet food, vet, pet care

  • make up, hair chemicals, nail care

  • purses, greeting cards, stationary, cut flowers, lingerie

  • jewelry, gemstones, precious metals

  • education, tuition, karate/ballet lessons, etc

  • music, instruments, lessons (I did buy $4 worth of guitar strings)

  • concert/festival/show/sporting event tickets

  • amusement parks, zoos, tourist attractions

  • admission fee to Cabrillo National Monument (went on the free day, damn it!)

  • toys, baby care

  • books, magazines, newspapers, textbooks

  • gym memberships, exercise equipment/classes, fitness electronics

  • club fees or dues, storage, marina fees

  • hotel, motel

  • furniture, home decoration

  • carpet, curtains, blinds, tile, flooring

  • dry cleaning

  • heating fuel, heating or AC of any kind, firewood

  • wood, lumber

  • bottled water - for the water, I may have needed a bottle or two

  • HFCS, BHT, BHA, TBHQ, tocopherols - some may have sneaked in but never intentionally

  • franchised fast food restaurants that sometimes have drive-thrus

  • take away coffee

I did actually spend some money on some of the things listed above, but not for myself. I didn’t go overboard with gifts or anything, but on review I was interested to discover the following.

  • 70% of my Amazon purchases were gifts

  • 65% of my Steam purchases were gifts

  • the only movie I bought tickets for were to a kid’s movie I didn’t want to see

Obviously I pissed away quite a bit of money on F-35s, shoddy drug safety, civil and human rights abuses, enriched uranium, and such. Not because I’m an idiot, but because there are a lot of them out there. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I’ll stick only to how money was spent after it arrived in my bank account. Anything spent before I ever had a chance to direct its destiny isn’t really money to me.

In 2016 I did pay quite a lot of money for some artisanal ivory carving, the ivory in question being attached to the inside of my mouth. However, in theory I will get that money back, effectively from my employer. It’s hard to know how to count money in an HSA because it’s not exactly fungible like money is supposed to be. As if health ethics didn’t ravage the very concept of capitalism enough. In the end, the process of extracting the money (ostensibly mine!) from its bureaucracy was more painful than the expense itself and even more painful than having one of my teeth mostly filed into dust.

So what did I spend money on in 2016? I tried to make a list of all of the goods and services which involved discretionary non-gift expenditures. I’m sure it’s not complete or entirely accurate, but it’s close enough to be interesting. (Note to future archaeologists who would no doubt find this all quite interesting - I strongly suspect that my cash flow is extremely abnormal.)

  • computer stuff

    • $20 - 64GB USB flash drive (which I use as the primary OS hard drive for my interface computer, i.e. the one I sit at)

    • $60 - Steam (always during sales)

    • $120 - off site hosting, domain registration

    • $720 - the evil ISP monopoly which is slightly less evil than AT&T

I find this pretty weirdly low in retrospect. "Computer stuff" is actually my profession too. I should probably buy some hard drives or something just on principle. I did buy a season of Game Of Thrones (used) (that I couldn’t get from the library) after reading the books (from the library). Other than that, Steam seems to have monopolized all of my entertainment dollars. I do use the library a lot.

Wearing clothes is not optional, even in southern California.

  • clothes and such

    • $40 - 12 shirts (3 for $10 at a T-shirt printer)

    • $40 - new socks and underwear

    • $44 - quarterly haircuts, including 22% tip

    • $80 - shoes to replace the 4 year old ones I still wear on the bike

    • $150 - laundry quarters, the mere acquisition and physical handling of which is more onerous than the monetary loss

I did actually take a vacation, but I managed to thriftily attach it to a conference my wife was attending for her job. Note that the "essential" cell phone bill is not that essential to me. I basically just turn it on when I’m travelling so I can "reliably" SSH back to my servers.

  • vacation

    • $10 - Denver Art Museum

    • $25 - one prepaid month of cell phone service, the full extent of what I paid for telephony of any kind in 2016, fewer than 10 telephone conversations all year

    • $100 - bicycle rentals to climb Loveland Pass in CO (three times)

    • $250 - plane ticket to Denver

When I retire, the first thing I’m going to ditch is my car. I hate cars and I hate driving. I really hate other people driving. The end is in sight, but until then…

  • driving

    • $16 - two car washes (illegal to DIY here)

    • $22 - oil and filter (changed myself)

    • $167 - registration

    • $475 - gasoline

Wow, the information superhighway is more expensive to me than literal highways. Of course that’s not the end of energy expenses.

  • utilities

    • $550 - electricity and gas (cooking/hot water)

    • $850 - water and trash

Of course food is a real expense. Ironically, avoiding HFCS and chemlab poisons cuts costs tremendously. I pretty much only buy groceries at Trader Joe’s. I only go to Ye Olde High Fructose Corn Syrup Shoppes to get those accursed quarters for the laundry machines.

  • food

    • $120 - replaced ancient toaster oven (>15 years) which I use probably once a day on average; a critical item where it is too hot for a proper oven

    • $400 - restaurants

    • $2,800 - Trader Joe’s - we spend about $4/person/day on TJs

And now we come to it. Where did all my money go?

  • $24,000 - rent

That’s for a crappy little 2 bedroom 1 bathroom 800sqft apartment. Still it’s one of the nicer apartments in this ridiculously expensive city. A major component of my retirement plan — move!

Besides managing grocery inventories, most of my mental energy related to shopping involves me fretting about all the things I should be selling on Craigslist. The idea of coveting things makes me queasy today. GDP does not equal happiness. The general wisdom is to "save for retirement" but I’m more aggressively working on the more reliable strategy of needing less and less. My mother tells a story of some of my first words, perhaps my first multi-word sentence. Like some kind of Pink Floyd song (we were in England), she was explaining that if I didn’t eat my dinner, there would be no pudding. Apparently I established a lifelong pattern by replying, "No pudding!"