A $400 monthly food budget may or may not sound like a challenge to you, and I picked that number because in my head it was a round number that sounded possible, but difficult. So I needed to know; how different is a $400 budget from what we normally spend on food?
Last night, Scott and I sat down and calculated how much we spent on food last month. We were shocked. The figure we came up with was based on credit card charges from grocery stores and restaurants. It does not include fast food purchases (made in cash), food that we already had in our pantry or fridge, food consumed at friend's houses or food, sodas, and coffee that Scott has available to him at work. In the month of December, our food bill was $769.46. When you add in the items that we could not count, our monthly food budget was easily over $800. I had decided to cut our food budget in half without even knowing it!
How does that compare us to the rest of the country? I checked out the US Department of Labor and found that in 2009 (the last year that data was available,) the average American family (of 2.5 people) spent $6133 on food (12.4% of their income) and $457 (0.9% of their income) on alcohol. That averages out to about $549.16 per month for that mythical family of 2.5 people. That multiplies our to $878.66 for a family of 4.--so we're pretty typical ).
I'm not sure how much food half of a person eats, but Grant and Connor eat like teenagers, complete with terrible table manners. Grant's preferred eating method is what I call "Cookie Monster style," where he grabs his food and shoves it into his mouth while moving his head from side to side. It's only by sheer volume that anything gets into his messy little mouth. And Connor sometimes eats like a bird and other days eats like someone just kicked off of Survivor.
Speaking of Survivor, we're eating much more than rice. Here's what we ate and spent today.
Breakfast
- S&K Oatmeal with brown sugar
- C&G Cereal with milk
$0.80
Lunch
- S&K The second half of the BOSS, tea
- G Crackers, Milk, Cheese, Oranges
- C BOSS, Carrots with 1 tbsp salad dressing, milk, orange, yogurt and crackers. (Can this kid eat or what?)
$4.51
Dinner
- SKC&G Chilimac using leftover chili and noodles, leftover cornbread, 1/2 bag of peas
$4.10
Dessert
- SKC&G 3 cookies each
$0.57
Total for Day 3, $9.98
Tomorrow, What we used to eat
I thought you'd each had half of the boss yesterday, not a quarter. That's not much... you're less far from that "half a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich" than I am...
ReplyDeleteI wonder if, because Connor eats nearly nothing some days and because the younger one is mostly just a baby, can you really count your family as eating what FOUR people would eat? I am thinking that you are closer to that original 2.5... With my 2 adults and 3 kids, I would count us as a family of around 3.5...
ReplyDeleteI was thinking this at first, too. In actuality, however, I think Kellie's statistics are extrapolated correctly, according to the source of the original data. They define a consumer unit as follows:
ReplyDelete"Members of a household consisting of (a) occupants related by blood, marriage, adoption, or some other legal arrangement; (b) a single person living alone or sharing a household with others, but who is financially independent; or (c) two or more persons living together
who share responsibility for at least 2 out of 3 major types of expenses."
According to that definition, even the baby would count as one under part a of the definition, because babies would have counted as one in the study from which the statistics are taken.
Ok.. Now I'm inspired to see how much we spent on food last month. All my lattes and eating out! I'm kind of scared to do the math. I think this is a great food budget challenge and you guys make me laugh :) Meghan
ReplyDelete