Consumer confidence in current economic conditions

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.

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When the Cost of a Mortgage is a Multiple of the Original Loan

In early 2021, the average rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage was under three percent. According to Freddie Mac, the average rate for the past week was 7.23%. That’s a big enough increase to feel the difference in your monthly payment, but it stings even more when you compound the cost over the length of a mortgage.

Use this chart to see how many times over you’ll pay over the original loan amount, given the annual rate and the number of years of paying.

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Gas prices and confidence

Everywhere you go, gas prices show up on big boards, like a proxy measurement for the times.

When gas prices are really low, something exciting is happening, and in my case when I was a teen, your mom tells you to drive across town to line up for the gas that dropped under a dollar. When gas prices are high, like they are these days, something must be up.

Emily Badger and Eve Washington, for The New York Times, show how that feeling is tied to consumer confidence:

Philip Bump, for The Washington Post, used connected scatterplots to show how gas prices are tied to approval ratings:

Connected scatterplots are kind of a tricky read at first, but approval and prices appear to go up and down at the same time. Look at it like a regular scatterplot at first, and then follow the line for time.

I wonder what this looks like if you go farther back. I’m guessing similar. What else is tied to gas prices? Will electricity prices eventually replace the familiar gas prices? Is it reasonable to tie our hopes and dreams to the price of a gallon? Is sentiment flipped for people who primarily ride bikes to get places? I have so many questions.

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Calculating the new cost of your summer road trip

With gas prices a lot higher than usual, JĂșlia Ledur, Leslie Shapiro, and N. Kirkpatrick, for The Washington Post, provide a calculator to see how much more your road trip will cost in the United States. Just put in your starting point, destination, and the type of car you drive.

Going the other direction, they also show how far you could go today on a 2019 budget with a handful of popular road trips. You’d kind of get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

I don’t drive much these days, but driving down Interstate 5 in California this past weekend had me feeling thankful that I didn’t buy that SUV in 2016.

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US spending on Ukraine

For NYT’s The Upshot, Bianca Pallaro and Alicia Parlapiano break down the United States’ $13.6 billion in emergency spending to help Ukraine against Russia.

They start with an overview treemap and then zoom in on each spending category with a new section. A thumbnail for each section keeps you oriented with each static image.

Over the years, the treemap has been NYT’s clear go-to for showing any kind of spending categories. You can see an evolution from interactive tool meant for exploration and the desktop to this most recent piece made to read and work on mobile. It seems like a pretty good indicator for visualization on the web as a whole.

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What People Spend Most of Their Money On, By Income Group, Relatively Speaking

The more money people come across, the more things they can and tend to buy. More money on average means bigger houses, more expensive cars, and fancier restaurants. But what if you look at relative spending instead of total dollars?

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All the provisions in the Build Back Better bill

For NYT’s The Upshot, Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui outlined all of the provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better bill and where the $2 trillion over 10 years will come from. A treemap provides an overview that sticks to the top of the page as you scroll through the table of line items.

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Rising prices of everything

Using Consumer Price Index, Alyssa Fowers and Rachel Siegel for The Washington Post show how the prices of everyday things rose since 2019. A set of baseline charts show lines moving up much more than one would hope, due to coronavirus and supply chain issues.

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Spending bill in a treemap box

Margot Sanger-Katz and Alicia Parlapiano for NYT’s The Upshot broke down a Democrat spending proposal. I like the lead-in treemap that shows the proposed components and the box that it needs to squeeze into:

I’ve seen treemaps that transition into different sizes, but I don’t think I’ve seen a box drawn on the outside of the treemap for comparison. It feels natural.

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How Spending Changed for Different Income Groups

I compared spending in 1996 against the most recent spending estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read More