Little Expenses That Add Up to One Year’s Rent [Infographic]

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Everyone’s complaining about the high cost of rent. An average monthly rent of $1,200 adds up to $14,400 per year. It sounds like a lot. But these non-essential and often overlooked expenses eat up about the same amount of money out of your annual budget when you count them all up.

So you may not agree that coffee is a “non-essential.” But what if you knew that a year’s worth of wasted food costs as much as one month of rent? Last night’s dinner leftovers may look a little more tempting next time you open the fridge.

Check out this cool visual and see which little expenses take the biggest bites out of your budget: 


RentCafe - Little Expenses that Add Up to One Year's Rent

*Disclaimer: To compile this infographic, RentCafe has collected data from several public sources and media reports – click here for the complete list of resources. This infographic has been produced for information purposes only and should not be considered as investment advice.

Fair use and redistribution

We encourage you and freely grant you permission to reuse, host, or repost the images in this article. When doing so, we only ask that you kindly attribute the authors by linking to RentCafe.com or this page, so that your readers can learn more about this project, the research behind it and its methodology.

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Nadia Balint is a senior creative writer for RENTCafé. She covers news and trends in residential and commercial real estate and their impact on our everyday life, including rental housing, for-sale housing, real estate development, homeownership, market reports, insurance, landlord-tenant laws, personal finance, urban development, economy, sustainability, and social issues. Nadia holds a B.S. in Business Management from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. You can connect with Nadia via email.

Nadia’s work and expertise have been quoted by major national and local media outlets, including CNN, CNBC, CBS News, Curbed, The NY Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post as well as industry publications, such as GlobeSt, Bisnow, Inman News, Multifamily Executive, and The Commercial Real Estate Show. Nadia also wrote for Multi-Housing News, Commercial Property Executive, HubSpot, and more. Prior to entering the real estate industry, Nadia worked in the legal field, where she gained over 10 years of experience in business, corporate, and real estate law.

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