You may remember last year, when Jimmy Chin, Jeremy Jones and Xavier de la Rue were in town trying to get some footage for the movie Further.  Well, conditions weren’t the best for those guys (if I recall, it was during a warm spell, and unfortunately, Jimmy got caught in quite a long avalanche skiing [...]

Today I wanted to share a little bit about something else I do on the web.

As you may know, I am a community editor for Bundle, a site about how America spends its money. What makes Bundle unique is its tool Everybody’s Money which visually illustrates how people spend money. The data comes primarily from Citi’s proprietary credit card data. As such, the spending can be broken down by age group, household type, income level, and zip code/city/state.

There’s so much to learn with all this data. We on the site have been using it for a variety of things.

In the spirit of sharing, I’d like to link out to a few of the coolest articles on the site:

The Bundle Report 2010
Which city in America spends the most money (it’s not New York)? Or which city spends the least? The folks at Bundle have used the Everybody’s Money tool to create clever infographics.

My favorite of these is spending by household type. Read this and you’ll have fun trivia to fill many a cocktail party.

Confession: I like my boyfriend more now that I know he’s loaded
Bundle also features content separate from its data tool. One type of article is a series of “money confessions” which are anonymous and true tales of money shame.

This particular article sparked a big discussion about whether this woman was justified in her feelings and how guys should react. I commented with a link to a psychological study showing women were more attracted to guys in expensive cars. I think this discussion reveals a lot about social attitudes in my generation…

Awkward Dollar: I know it’s only $15. But it’s my $15 and I’d like it back
The Awkward Dollar is another regular feature on Bundle somewhat separate from the Everybody’s Money data. This series is about anonymous rants and uncomfortable money discussions.

This linked to article is about dealing with a friend who “forgets” to repay a small amount of $15. What to do? I’ve been there before, as I’m sure you have. I gave my opinion as a comment though not everyone felt the same way. Never easy to deal with money and friends, so you gotta choose one way.

Fun fact: San Franciscans spend 43 percent more than the national average on food and drink
This is one of my insights from the data. I rolled up monthly data for the city of San Francisco and for the nation at large and found a surprising trend. Here’s a graph I made with the data from Bundle:

Pretty cool to see how local and state spending were in line with the seasonal trends at the national level. Lesson learned: national statistics do matter!

What are the five most charitable states?
A fun statistic generated from Bundle data.

I would have never guessed these were the five most…and I was also intrigued to see where my home state of Illinois ended up (middle of the pack).

How to save money on cool, crisp water (and Part II of the same article)
This is one of the early articles on the site so it’s got plain formatting.

Nonetheless it is full of great trivia and it’s very well written piece about bottled water, and I hope you check it out.

Do you Bundle?
I’ll keep you posted on interesting finds on Bundle, but I hope you find it interesting and check it out too! There are many cool areas to explore and spending patterns to uncover.

And if you like, you can also find Bundle on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr. Let me know what you think!

Dude…are you freaking kidding me??? Is this the ultimate way to get your afternoon turns?












I got a few chuckles out of the commentary of this video, especially towards the end. But the real deal is just the thought of being able to fire up your own little [...]

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