DO YOU know how much you spend each week on food and drink, fuel and housing, clothing, insurance, etc? About £311, according to the latest CSO Household and Budget Survey for the years 1994-95. The survey is done once every seven years with thousands of families around the country asked to reveal their income as well as details of their weekly expenditure on food, clothes and all the other items of daily living.
The CSO does not just ask how much Mr and Mrs Ireland's food bill costs - which, by the way is £70.75 per week - but what goes into the shopping basket? Are those peas frozen or fresh? Is the soup packet or tinned? Is it sirloin or round steak you have chosen?
The last survey was published in 1987 when the average household reported a weekly disposable income of £200.96 (£247.82 gross) and an average food bill of £56. Housing cost just £19.66 instead of £30.56 today, and transport was £30.30 a week instead of £44.73. Total weekly expenditure in 1987, including all services and miscellaneous expenses like entertainment, reading material, gifts, etc., was £223 leaving the average household with a budget deficit of about £22 or 10.4 per cent.
Things have improved marginally since then. With weekly costs of £311.73 and a disposable income of just £281.91, the average household in 1994-95 had to find an extra £29.82 each week (9.6 per cent) to pay the bills. Over a year, this amounts to £1,550 worth of debt, which probably explains the big percentage jump in credit card usage since 1987 - from just 17.9 per cent of all households then to 26.3 per cent today.
What has changed quite considerably over the period are the items that householders are buying. In 1987 just 20 per cent of households owned a video recorder - today that figure is 65 per cent. The ownership of computers has nearly trebled to 16 per cent while the purchase of burglar alarms has also trebled from 3.6 per cent of all households to 11.7 per cent. Microwaves are now present in nearly half (46.7 per cent) of the kitchens of the nation compared to just 6.3 per cent in 1987 and fewer households are washing their own dishes nearly 19 per cent of homes had a dishwasher in 1994-95 compared to just 7.6 per cent of homes in 1987.
Mortgages now account for 5.04 per cent of the weekly budget, compared to 4.42 per cent in 1987 and house insurance costs are also up proportionately. The proportion of budget spent decorating and repairing our homes has dropped slightly, no doubt related to the high number of new houses and apartments that have been purchased over the period.
The figures relating to the purchase of pensions and life assurance is not particularly good news for the insurance industry. In 1987 pension fund contributions accounted for just 1.51 per cent of total expenditure per week in 1994-95 that percentage had only increased to 1.53 per cent. The amount spent on life insurance is only a bit more encouraging with contributions rising from 2.07 per cent of disposable income to 2.19 per cent. The difference in the cost of motor insurance for the average household is more apparent with the percentage of weekly expenditure rising from 1.85 per cent to 2.07. Fortunately the impact of petrol purchases on the weekly budget has deceased from 3.99 per cent to 3.13 per cent. In monetary terms this amounts to an average extra spend of only 80p per week in 1994-95.
The Household Budget Survey 1994-95 (Preliminary Results) is available from the CSO, Information Section, Skehard Road, Cork or from the Government Publications Sale Office, Sun Alliance" House, Molesworth St., Dublin 2, Price: £5.
