Here are visualizations developed by creditloan which depicts how the average US household spent their annual paycheck over the years. Below is one such graph for 2010 expenditures.
Description : The charts summarize the breakdown of consumer expenditures with respect to different categories like housing, food, healthcare etc. The underlying data is collected from the survey of the consumers conducted by US Department of Labor.
Audience : The chart is intended for general public to assess their spending. Additionally, the visualization provides a sneak peak to the government into the average household spendings to focus on the median income range households when planning policies, federal budgets and debt ceilings.
Critique :
- The chart is overburdened with data. There are way too many images that are accommodated without absolute necessity. In addition to images, there are too many numbers, colors making it difficult to get to the information-of-interest.
- Though the article introductions conveys that we are going to looking at how the spendings have been over the last couple of years, it is quite difficult to gain insight of data/category comparisons over the years.
- The expenditure presentation over the years is not consistent at all. Representations for 2013, 2014 and 2015 are through infographics but 2010 and 2009 are represented in doughnut charts and 2012 data is represented through an embedded video.
- Taking a closer look at the doughnut charts, there are scaling issues with no ordering. The infographic lists all of the numbers in the Consumer Expenditure Survey in no particular order without providing any interpretation or relative comparison. Among the charts presented, the tabular format of 2011 representation seems to be the best as it is easier to read and get to the information-of-interest with not much looking around.
Betterment :
- The data from the survey can be better represented using stacked bar charts by year. The expenditure breakdown by category can be appropriately represented so as to track the changes in expenditure for a particular category over the years.
- Each category would be represented by a different color. Though not-so-minor variations cannot be captured as the category in bar chart may not be aligned to the same line. To address this concern, the percentage values can be put into each portion. This feature also conveys what category contributed most of the expenditure for a particular year in a straightforward manner.
- The stacked bar chart is an uncomplicated way of reading the changing trends over the years rather than having a consistent format of separate charts for different years.
References :
https://www.creditloan.com/blog/how-the-average-us-consumer-spends-their-paycheck/
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/where_does_all_the_money_go_shifts_in_household_spending_over_the_past_30_y