The Central Statistics Office have just revealed what Irish householders spend their money on.
The survey was taken between February 2015 and February 2016, covering 6,839 households.
The CSO reveal that the average gross weekly income for Irish households was €1,097.04 during the study, which was 6.8% higher than the €1,026.77 figure recorded five years earlier.
The average weekly expenditure for all households was €845.12, which is 4.3% higher than the €810.61 figure recorded in 2010.
So what are we spending our money on?
There has been a 30% decrease in the expenditure on alcohol and tobacco, with the average household going from spending €39.48 per week to €28. More people are consuming alcohol at home with the proportion of total alcohol expenditure on alcohol consumed at home increasing from over 41% in 2009-2010 to over 51% in 2015-2016.
14.6% of the expenditure goes on food, a drop from 16.2% five years before.
In 1980, medical related expenditure (such as expenditure on doctors, dentists, medicines and health insurance) accounted for 1.8% of total household expenditure in contrast to 5.9% thirty five years later.
Source: CSO
Expenditure on Transport increased by nearly 7% from €116.31 per week in 2009-2010 to €124.39 in 2015-2016. This was due to an increase in expenditure on car purchases; however there was a 7.1% percent decrease in expenditure on Transport when expenditure on car purchases was excluded.
However we spend most of our money on miscellaneous goods and services such as health, childcare, education, pensions, and telephones, which has increased from 20.5% in 1980 to 34.2% to 2015-2016.
Gadgets
Claire Burke, Statistician says that in 2015-2016, 81% of households said that they had at least one home computer, compared with 77.3% and 56.2% five and ten years previously. In 2015-2016, just over half (50.9%) reported having two or more home computers.
Wifi is more popular too, with almost 73% of households indicated they had internet access in 2015-2016, compared with just under 66% five years earlier.
In 2015-2016, less than 66% of households had a fixed telephone. This is a drop of twenty percentage points from ten years earlier when just under 86% of households had a fixed landline.