[OC]- 2025 monthly budget, family of 5, Northeast US Visualization

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC]- 2025 monthly budget, family of 5, Northeast US" and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on My wife and I (mid 40s) live in the Northeast. I’m securely employed, she’s a SAHM. We have two kids, one in elementary and one in middle school, and my MIL lives with us. I made a rough diagram of average monthly income and spending in 2025. Time limitations prevented me from getting more granular than this. I’m interested in tips anyone might have for how to better visualize this or break it down, or any comments or suggestions about our expenses or saving habits.

Some notes for questions I can anticipate:

Activities include gym membership, exercise classes, kids’ camps, music lessons, martial arts.

Travel is a major priority for my wife and I

We have a dog on a special diet and a number of smaller animals

Discretionary is a mix of clothing, fun stuff (sports, museums, movies, etc), political and charitable donations, birthday parties, gifts, things for the house and yard, streaming services, etc. There are mixed purchases from Costco, target, etc that have items from other categories, especially food, but time does not permit me to parse this out further.

Family support is to two destinations. One is my mother, a conspiratorial boomer who can’t even remotely afford to be retired and expects me to pay her property taxes and for repairs on her house. She raised me right and helped pay for the education that got me to this point. I can’t threaten to withhold money and mean it, she’d lose the house and get thrown out on the street just to spite me. The other is my wife’s family who live overseas. A relatively small amount of money to us makes a huge difference in their quality of life.

Feel free to judge me for the whole life insurance. It grows at a guaranteed 4% rate and I figure holding this for decades will be like a bond. I use the dividend to reduce the premium so that gets smaller every year. If I had known what the stock market was going to do 15 years ago, I wouldn’t have bought it. But who knew? In any case I have plenty of stocks in the 401K and brokerage so I didn’t miss out.

I’ve been lucky to have had supportive parents when it counted, to have grown up when and where I did, and to find a career where I can make a difference in people’s lives. Now that the kids are a little older and my day to day isn’t quite so frantic I’m looking for blind spots or bad habits that have developed that might hamper my goal of retiring decades before my physical health starts to deteriorate. You can’t be objective from the inside, so have at it. Any and all thoughts are appreciated and I can answer questions., which allows us to understand complex relationships and insights within the data through visual storytelling.

Deep Dive into the Topic

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