Sankey Visualization With Our Money Flowchart

Sankey Visualization

I call it Mr. Sankey because if you are familiar with Mr. Hankey from South Park (a piece of doo doo) that’s what this graph reminds me of. Our Sankey is the ugliest one out of everyone else’s.

My husband spotted the first Sankey money flow graph on Reddit and he was incredibly excited to do it. He never got around to it. A week later, everyone was making these Sankey’s graphs. So when everyone started doing it and he said: “I don’t want to do it if everyone’s doing it.”

What a hipster hubby is!

Related: Making Our Epileptic Rainbow Unicorn Themed Financial Map

Our Mr. Sankey

The Sankey graph has our annual money flow for the entire year of 2017 minus December still in progress. The big hitters are here includes the paycheck income, rental income, and stock grants. It’s missing side hustles and his work bonuses which makes up a small percentage of income. We only included the big picture items. The reality is the majority of his income deductions goes towards taxes. I wonder if our tax dollars are being used productively– [laughs] I doubt it!

The large other deductions go to fund our 401K and the rest goes towards HSA and insurance. We have not contributed to our IRA this year specifically – we’ll have a go at it next year for this 2017 year since we have until the tax deadline. Deductions make up about 60% of his paycheck so the remaining 40% of hubby’s take-home goes to cover housing costs for both our primary residence and rental.

The leftovers from that go to cover our living expenses are very low. The contrast is stark on the Sankey graph because it looks no thicker than an udon noodle! We’re doing something right – right? We’re not missing anything in our life that I know of. In fact, we’ve been decluttering. How did we accumulate so much random stuff…we hardly buy anything anymore. For example: between Hubby and I – we have 6 pieces of luggage; 3 of them jumbo sized from our pre-personal finance days.

After living expenses, what is left of the paycheck is funneled into Airbnb profits into the umbrella term of “investments” which includes way too many brokerage accounts to keep track of right now. We just opened up a Fidelity brokerage one this year. The stock grants funnel into another brokerage as well that we didn’t use before.

I will admit my Mr. Sankey is ugly and it is too linear. It looks like without stock grants or Airbnb that we would barely break even but we do drop a galore of monies ($60k) into our 401K per year. Plus the taxes have to cover the Airbnb income and the stock grants as well. Otherwise, our taxes would be lower especially because Washington is a pretty tax friendly state.

What We Learned

1. Our Sankey graph is kind of ugly but UX design has never been Hubby strong suit. This Sankey could be redesigned to something more visually appealing like when I did the unicorn money map inside IO but that’s small fish because it’s free! You can make your own money Sankey graph with SanKeyMATIC and download it afterward.

2. A portion of my husband’s paycheck goes towards taxes. That’s why there are months where Hubbys take-home paycheck is only a fraction and seems low compared to Airbnb income. Most of it went to tax withholdings and retirement. My Airbnb income is higher but that’s only because Hubby used his income to take the bullet for my Airbnb. The bullet being taxed.

3. Money gets messy. I was not happy with Hubby and how much he simplified it. He made it when I was cleaning up at the rental and I wanted mine to look more like other bloggers with numbers and all the details. But then again, we report our monthly budget with ALL the details already so it’s easier to just gloss over those.

4. Our living expenses are barbarically low. It’s almost morbid AND I LOVE IT. We live like we’re on our last dollar and I only find it amusing because we’re not really on our last dollar. If we were, I would say “THIS BLOWS CHUNKS.” Frugality by choice is much more fun compare to frugality out of necessity.

Check Out Other Sankeys

Anchor: JumpStartfromScratch

Othala fehu

J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly

Biglaw Investor

Military Dollar

Does anyone wanna reserve a seat for when we’re 75 years old and see where hardcore the frugal living thing and the high-income thing could get us. I haven’t even busted out my own garden yet! Blessed are the ones who find true joy in frugality <3…and pizza.

May the pizza Gods bless you many pizzas and no greasy faces because you’re all beautiful. ?