2006 Year In Review Statement

I received an email from my Chase account tonight, letting me know that a new statement had been posted to my account - the 2006 Year in Review Statement.

Huh.

I’m pleasantly surprised by the thing. It’s a great breakdown of my spending habits on my credit card over the year. There’s a chart, with the following categories broken down by month: Travel and Entertainment, Restaurant, Automotive, Merchandise, Services, and Miscellaneous.

There’s a pie chart for all the categories below that, which showed the breakdown as:
0.67% Miscellaneous
3.86% Restaurants
8.86% Automotive
23.21% Services
30.34% Merchandise
33.06% Travel and Entertainment

And there’s a bar graph of the monthly spending patterns at the bottom. The following pages show all the items, sorted by category. My only issue with the whole thing is that they grouped my grocery purchases into “Merchandise,” which is not where I would have thought to look for them.

The other problem is that I don’t use my credit card for everything. Since July, I’ve had a debit card which I put most of my gas and grocery purchases on. I could, on my own, recalculate everything to include those purchases as well, but frankly, I’m not likely to do that.

But, I will make predictions for the 2007 statement:

10.00% Miscellaneous - I bumped this up to make the numbers work
5.00% Restaurants - a nice round number
25.00% Automotive - this will go up now that I have my own car
10.00% Services - this will go down, simply because the things placed in this category are things I’m not as likely to buy this year
30.00% Merchandise - since groceries are included, I don’t anticipate much change
20.00% Travel and Entertainment - this will go down due to a new-found frugality