December 17, 1998 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.) High income households allocate smaller expenditure shares to necessitiesIn 1994-95, households with annual incomes of more than $90,000 allocated smaller shares of their money to necessities, such as food at home, shelter and utilities, transportation, and health care. Instead, higher-income households spent larger shares on such items as food away from home, personal insurance and pensions, cash contributions, and entertainment.
Food expenditures accounted for about 11 percent of spending for high-income households, compared with more than 14 percent for other households. This difference occurred despite the fact that higher-income households spent a larger share on food away from home. Higher-income households allocated 3.4 percent of expenditures on health care, some 2.2 percentage points less than the health care share for lower-income households. Data on spending by income are produced by the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. For additional information, see Summary 98-10, "Issues in Labor Statistics: Spending Patterns of High-income Households".
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