Food

I could write this entire gratitude post as a joke about how much I love food and how grateful I am for all the yummy foods out there. Donuts, pizza, cake, cheeseburgers, brownies, garlic bread, cookies... I love food way too much for my own good. And I am thankful that we live in a world with such wonderful variety of tastes and textures and general awesomeness of food! I'm sort of glad I live in an era that, for the most part, has moved on from jello salads with shredded carrots in them (unless it's for an ironic, retro effect), and now we all think we're at least a little bit foodie-gourmet. We get foods from all over the world, available at our grocery stores and restaurants. It's a good time to be alive, enjoying food!

But what I'm actually thinking of today, as I reflect on my many blessings, it's much more simple. I'm grateful that we can put food on the table. Ample food, and for a large family. I feel like it's a blessing that's easily taken for granted, and I often bemoan that we aren't able to eat out more than we do if we're sticking to our budget. If I stop to think about the issue even for a second, though, I remember that we have more to eat each day than many families throughout the world have in a week.

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I sat down today to go over our monthly budget and try to get us back on track as the holidays approach. (Hey there, Dave Ramsey! It's been a while!). As I looked at our spending for the past year, the average amount we spend on groceries didn't surprise me, exactly, but it did make me curious about what a typical grocery budget looks like in the US. I like to think of myself as a frugal shopper, nearly always buying store brands, and making most things from scratch. I don't often use coupons, but that's because nearly every time I've set out to do so, I find that there either aren't coupons for the items I buy, or the store brand is still cheaper than the name brand with a coupon.

I'm going to throw some numbers at you now, but keep reading if you've stuck with me this far, because near the bottom there's a question I'm posing to you, and I really would love to get some responses, whether here or in private.

I did some quick internet searching and found a lot of data for families of four. Given how young our kids are, that's probably not far off from our family of 7. I found one government survey break down here, from 2008, that gives enough info to calculate for various sizes of family, so I tried using that one. (I like that in the footnotes they show how to adjust numbers in a way that appears to take into account economies of scale - meaning that you save some money by cooking for a large group over a bunch of individuals. I know I'm a nerd. Remember, I have a degree in Accountancy. Just the fact that I didn't say "a degree in Accounting" should highlight the depth of nerdiness.)

Based on our last 10 months, I show that we have an average monthly grocery expenditure of $860. Again that's for a family of 7 with kids aged 10 and under. It includes our regular weekly grocery trip, as well as trips to Sam's Club every couple months and occasional Trader Joe's runs. I keep fairly detailed record of our spending, so it's safe to say that's accurate. If I look at the family of four info, that puts us somewhere between their "low-cost" and "moderate-cost" ranges. If I actually calculate the number for a family of 7 with our demographics (how funny is it that I have one kid in each of their five child age categories?), we bump down to between "thrifty" and "low-cost"! Here are the family-of-7 numbers I came up with:

Moderate - $1200
Low-budget - $976
Thrifty - $757

This honestly makes me feel so good! I wish I could get our grocery budget down much further, but since I already feel like I'm a cautious shopper, it's comforting to know that I really do rank on the low end for spending! And given how much I think grocery prices have gone up in the past five years, I'd guess that a more recent report would show I'm spending even closer to "thrifty".

The next question this raises for me is how much additional money most families spend on dining out. The info above is for the "cost of food at home", but if average families are spending that much on groceries plus eating out an average of five times a week (a stat from a 2011 survey I came across in my morning's research), their combined spending on food must be significantly higher than ours. We eat out at most once a week, typically less.

In NO WAY am I trying to make anyone else feel bad about what you are spending. There are lots of things that I wish I could spend more on, organic fruits and the like, but don't because I know we can't afford it. Obviously someone with higher income can spend more on groceries and there is nothing wrong with that! But I am very, very curious whether these numbers are at all realistic among the people I actually know, you know? It's possible that the report is heavily skewed by more expensive parts of the country, and given our low cost of living city, I'm not really all that thrifty at all.

If you're willing, I'd be very interested to know, for those of you who track such things, what your monthly or weekly grocery budget looks like (along with your family size, if I don't already know, for comparison's sake). You can reply in the comments or email me if you'd rather not put it out there on the web. If I get enough response, maybe I'll compile a little report about it to share with you, my lucky, lucky readers!

Now that I have spent more time researching nationwide grocery budgets than I should have spent working on our household finances at all today, I'd best finish my task.