(no subject)

[lethargic_man]

I seem to have taken going to the Marom Bet Midrash and Shmooze quite a bit. They both cost £5 including food (at the level of bagel and smoked salmon), which is a bit of a hit expenditure-wise. It's occurred to me I have little of a handle on what people consider normal expenditure on leisure activities. What sort of figure do you come up with, if you don't mind me asking, if you were to tot up your average weekly expenditure on such things as drinks, eating out, films, cigarettes, etc? And what sort of figure would you think would be average for middle-class people such as myself and most of the readers of this blog?

Comments

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

I think £5 is pretty good value for that. My average weekly expenditure on such things is basically nil. We eat out maybe once a month, to the tune of maybe $40 between us. We should probably get out more, but we're always so damn tired.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It probably is good value; I'm just spoiled by eight years of subsidised events as a student.

[liv]

You don't really want my answers to this cos you know I'm mean with money and not really in an equivalent economic situation to yours. I know plenty of people a lot poorer than you (eg students who earn basically nothing and borrow to be able to exist at all) who think nothing of spending £20-£25 on an evening out maybe a couple of times a week. As for cigarettes, anyone who smokes is almost certainly spending more than a fiver a week on cigarettes.

I just wanted to point out that I don't think 'middle-class' is the relevant descriptor here. Because it's a social definition, not a financial definition. A middle-class person who is recently out of university and paying off debts but hasn't got a professional job yet, or a middle-class person raising a family on one-and-a-half incomes, is in a completely different economic situation from you. It would be more relevant to ask about, say, single people in professional jobs.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I've worked for years on ten per cent of total income being a reasonable max for entertainments. [ and what it says that I had written that as "ents" without thinking is that my undergrad context is more prevalent than I thought. ]

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Whoa, either I'm getting my sums completely wrong, or that's an order of magnitude higher than the other answers I'm getting, including my own.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hypatia_/]

ten per cent doesn't seem that out of line if you are including things like holidays, family visits, wine/cigs/chocolates if you indulge. I probably hit ten percent but that includes things like family holidays etc. Trips to the theatre or concerts etc are also quite expensive when buying four/five tickets rather than one per income so I'm not sure how comparable it is. Also expenditure for evenings with friends here tends to get absorbed into general housekeeping.

If you include music and book buying in 'leisure expenditure' I'd probably be embarrassed :)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Eeep, books. I'd completely forgotten to take that into account, and it does raise my average considerably (though rather less than the £100 a month after I finished my Ph.D., when I was buying all the books I'd read library copies of in the previous four years)...

[liv]

But bookies are more fun than money :-p

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

pretty bad atm.. £30 - £40? *cringe* i think that will reduce drastically as soon as we have somewhere proper to live.

i expect £30 would be a reasonable average; if i was paid a normal wage i would be happy with that.

Leisure expenditure

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Seems I'm on the low side of average, then; even adding in a tenner a week for £300 Limmud (http://www.limmud.org/conf/conf2004/imagine) once a year plus quarterly train ticket to Newcastle averaged out across the year.

Which is interesting, because it comes out as a bit less than the quarterly-odd trip to Dundee, quarterly-odd to Newcastle, occasional youth hostel or trip to Cambridge, but no Limmud I was doing last year (for values of last year ending mid-December, when I split up with livredor). I'd thought Limmud would be a bigger hit averaged out than it actually is.

Though this of course only applies at the present; I'm sure my expenditure will bump back up again if I get myself into another relationship...