This report describes the construction of an aggregate household expenditure variable for the 2008 National Income Dynamics Survey (NIDS.) Section 2 discusses the construction of the food and non-food aggregate expenditure variables. Section 3 explains the construction of the housing expenditure variable. Each of these sections briefly discusses the questionnaire design, the patterns of non-response in the data, and the methods used to impute missing values. In section 4, we compare our constructed aggregate expenditure with the reported aggregate expenditure. In section 5, we conduct some basic analyses using the derived total expenditure variable. We examine the components of household expenditure. We also analyze differences in expenditures by key descriptors such as race and geotype. The analysis concludes by comparing the derived total expenditure variable to the derived total income variable.