(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

[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