We’re currently undertaking a major piece of analysis to better understand how consumer spending has changed over the last 10 years. What do you spend your money on now that you didn’t a decade ago?
To get a better understanding of how spending has changed, the Which? Consumer Insight team is using extremely detailed data from the Office for National Statistics. This will allow us to analyse how different types of consumers and different places are faring.
Some of the results will come as no surprise. For instance, in the last ten years, spending on essentials (and in particular energy) has risen dramatically. However, other results aren’t so obvious. And, as we have real data on actual consumers’ spending on over 1,900 different types of goods and services, we can go into a fascinating level of detail.
We don’t want to give the game away yet, as we’ll be publishing our results later this year, but to bring our analysis to life we need your help.
Your chance to help
We want to hear from you about your experiences over the last 10 years. In particular, we want to know about:
• How and why your spending has changed.
• The impacts that these changes have had and how you have looked to adjust.
• How things might change in the future.
For me, the results look familiar. The biggest changes to my spending have come from a leap into the property market and a renewed level of consumer engagement since joining Which? last year (I recently saved £150 on my home insurance by shopping around!). I can also recognise the rising cost of essentials, offsetting falls in recreational spending.
Others will undoubtedly have different views and we want to hear from a broad range of people. We’ll be using some of your responses in our upcoming report and we may even video a small number of you to use as clips alongside our report. So now it’s over to you.