The main objective of this paper is to describe the rural and urban households of the Cauca department in Colombia. The idea is to classify the households according to their typology and household life cycle in order to establish their relation with the minimum levels of expenditure on basic goods, this means with the ones that define the critical poverty thresholds. For this end, the 2011 Quality of Life survey is used as well as multifactorial variance analysis. The results show that the most common type of household for both rural and urban areas is the nuclear type of household with children, showing usually a minimal basic expenditure on food, housing and health. Education and transportation present higher consump-tion levels at urban households.