Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Groceries

How much do you spend on groceries in a month? Check out this article. Generally, I'm pretty careful about groceries. I shop at Costco a lot, and stick to a list whenever I go grocery shopping. Generally, I have a few meals planned for the week, mostly based on what I have on hand. Once a week I'll go grocery shopping and get the few items I'll need for the week that we may be out of, and stock up on sale items.

I hate letting food go to waste, and fortunately for me, my hubby has no problems with leftovers! Owning a wedding/banquet facility helps, too. We donate a lot of food to the local community kitchen, but we also get some awesome leftovers from catered weddings and parties! My budget is $150 every two weeks and that feeds three adults. I did spend $300 on beef back in November that wasn't included in that amount, also.

Compared to most of my friends, I think that's pretty cheap, but I'm really curious how much the "average" family spends. I've never really factored in dining-out expenses, though. Generally, I don't eat out a lot, especially since I started the whole gluten-free eating (which, by the way, flew out the window the last three weeks, but that's another post for another day!), but I do enjoy breakfast at McDonald's way too much, and the hubby likes his Friday-night clam chowder at The Burg! I've decided this year I'm going to try and keep better track of how my money is spent and see if I can reduce my budget even more. We'll see how it goes.

3 comments:

Senior Bowler-Carolyn said...

Jay and I spend about $ 130.00 a week at Walmart that includes bathroom stuff (efferdent, fixodent, etc)for just us.

kristi said...

We budget $400 a month, that includes food, formula, diapers, and toiletry items. If we eat out at all (other than our date nights, which comes from other budgeted money) it also comes out of the $400 a month.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the link you included. So interesting to see what other people spend on food. I also found it interesting the examples of food that other countries eat. It puts our country to shame.

Jami said...

I liked the artical to see what they got for there money.. I wish it had like income ratio (average of common income so you could see how much money they are taking out of their budget for food) or something because I'm a number person. I've been trying to stick to a budget but haven't been really good (Christmas) at it my new goal is to do $300-400 per month on all of my food/baby stuff ect. I'm not counting Costco trips since often I'm getting stuff that will last the whole year so maybe at the end I will figure that into to equation.