One-quarter of all the money we spend on a daily basis goes to pay for shelter – that includes the cost of housing, heating and electricity. That’s about double what we spend on transportation and triple our expenditures for food and beverages.
Those are some of the findings of a year-end report from StatsCan on household spending.
In Saskatchewan, we shell out $44 billion to look after our day-to-day needs before taxes. And the government lays out another $13 billion to pay for things like education and health services.
And when you add in smaller items such as the contribution of non-profits, the total was just under $60 billion in 2022 which is 20 per cent higher than just two years earlier.
The most volatile category in our workaday world is international travel. COVID trimmed it more than 90 per cent in 2020 from $1 billion a year to under $30 million in 2021. The good news is we are making come back – it was up 20 times in 2022 and we have to wait until this time in 2025 to see what it did last year.
