Notice anything big that sticks out there? Yeah, me too. Taxes! Our single largest monthly expense is federal income taxes. I'm self-employed, so my family has the joy of cutting a check to the federal government every month to the tune of about $2,800.

By comparison, we spend only $1,268/month on our mortgage. Our federal income tax liability is 2.2 times our housing costs!

I took some time recently to break down what that $2,800 per month is spent on by the federal government. I computed these numbers by looking at the budgeted expenditures of the federal government in 2012 and applying the categorical spending percentages to my monthly expense (source: www.usgovernmentspending.com ).