Food Budgets, Grocery Shopping, and Quantifying What We Eat
By Nick | February 20, 2012
The other day I was curious how much we spend on food.
We’ve been fortunate enough to never have a strict grocery “budget” per se; I mean we’re not eating caviar, but we’re not eating ramen either. And I’m like pretty awesome when it comes to maximizing my Safeway Club Card savings.
I looked at 2 years worth of credit card and bank statements. My method did not account for any cash spending, like at farmer’s markets. (Which really wasn’t that much the last 2 years, but there’s a goal to shift more spending there going forward.)
I also did not include any restaurant purchases.
In 2010, we spent $3735, or $311 per month. Put another way, we spent roughly $5.18 per person per day.
In 2011, we spent $4254, or $354 per month. That’s $5.90 per person per day.
Under $6 a day seems remarkably cheap!
I have no idea what happened in January of last year that caused such a spike. We started eating more of a “slow carb diet” but that really doesn’t explain that large an increase.
The sad thing is we’re getting less efficient in our grocery shopping. In 2010, we made 115 trips; in 2011, 137. That means we went to the grocery store every 2.6 days on average. I would love to see that number increase in 2012 with better meal planning and list-making.
I do most of the grocery shopping, and TJ’s is on the same side of the freeway as the gym. It’s a little thing but it’s enough to make me prefer going there over Safeway.
That’s all. How much do you spend on food? Are you getting a good value?
It would probably be interesting to add in restaurant spending but it’s a lot harder to track.
1 Comment
Caresse on February 23, 2012 at 11:32 am.
So, I have a fond memory of our crab feed one Saturday last January. As I recall you and B brought all of the of the food over to our place and we split the cost of the food. I believe it was about $85-100. This could have been part of the reason behind the spike in January!