The musical "Rent" asks its audience how it measures a year, and Reddit user u/Civris seems to have taken that as a challenge. After painstakingly scrounging up all of their pluses and minuses for 2023, they slammed that data into a site called SankeyMATIC to create a flow diagram for the ages.
When you combine this person's mileage pay and fuel surcharge pay for their trucking business, they end up with a total of $339,586.63. Add in $43,864.19 from spousal income, $26,312.40 from investments and a $30,000 savings withdrawal — that's $439,763.22 to figure out.
Right off the bat, over $92,000 is allocated to taxes and a 401K. Nearly $160,000 goes to business expenses like fuel and truck payments and the remaining $183,388.09 is dedicated to personal expenses.
Notably, the chart has an enormous $31,573.51 allocated to "Vacation" spending. The poster detailed that those were spread across flights ($6,245), and hotels ($13,142.82), and the rest was spread out over food, entertainment, and logistics. As it turns out, that princely sum was dedicated to a single three-week vacation in Hawaii.
$1,840.64 was used on "Fast food" while "Dining Out" took up $1,509.90. If it was me, I'd muddy this up by hiding how much I spent on fries, but u/Civris is clearly a person of integrity.
When all was done, the trucker spent 3,250 hours working in 2023 — averaging 67.7 hours a week when not on vacation. That's a lot of time, for sure, but those bottom-line numbers are hard to argue with.
