It’s hard to pinpoint our food budget as well. For starters, we get our main weekly groceries at the Super Mega Gigantic Mart and most weeks our bill includes something other than food from the pharmacy and / or household goods section. On top of that we subscribe to a farmers co-op produce delivery service in the summer, and when I’m in the city I’ll stock up on specialty groceries from Chinatown and Eataly. It would actually be pretty hard to parse and consolidate all those bills.
At one point I was semi-interested in tracking our spending by category, but it turns out that “Amazon” and “Costco” as top results made that Quicken report pretty uninformative.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit $2k/month on food for our family of 5, but I also don’t mind remaining in the dark.
$2k/month total spend seems insanely low.
T12, $1200/month for food for two adults in a HCOL city. Rarely eat out in restaurants, but will do delivery when Uber Eats throws 40% off coupons at me. This includes alcohol, as well as dining on trips/vacations.
2019 it was actually a touch higher, which I found surprising.
First 12 months of COVID (April 2020 - March 2021), it was $950/month. Somehow, April 2020 was like $360.
What’s T12? What’s an HCOL?
High cost of living
Trailing 12 months, and high cost of living.
April 2020 you probably spent just cleaning out whatever was in the cupboards. I remember a lot of us were scared to leave the house at all and wouldnt even think about letting some rando touch our food for delivery right off the bat. Not to mention the uncertainty of a majority of industries so we had no idea if we would have a job the next day or not. I imagine money hoarding was pretty high those first couple months.
That changed pretty quickly but I wouldnt be surprised if everyone spent very very little in April 20.
For us it was probably mostly tightening our belts in anticipation of potential income losses, but it’s not as if we had weeks (or even days) worth of food in the pantry or ate rice for 30 days. I recall going to the store rather frequently (and waiting outside in line to do so), to the point where Ms. JordanIB got upset that I was doing that so often. But I probably just bought economically (family packs of chicken and other meats, etc.), and just cooked a lot at home in big batches that brought the per-meal cost down significantly. And probably less booze. And no delivery.
In may it had snapped back to nearly $1K.
Some of y’all need to eat more ham and cheese sandwiches and less artisan avocado toast
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Ham and cheese?!?!?!? LUXURY!
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He was lucky to have sandwich a’tall. Sandwich for us was “which sand do we eat?”.
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Sand? You were lucky! We only had crushed glass we gathered from the gutter where we lived.
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My dad’s family used to get real gubmint cheese when he was growing up
He says that it was better than any cheese he can buy now, and he also says that nobody helped him, so why should his taxes go to deadbeats
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Y’all had gutters? Fuckin rich kids
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I know not necessarily the kind of gutters you meant
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My grandparents got a 5-lb block of cheese. They gave it to us.
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But I spent a ton of money in March 2020 stocking my cupboards for the impending shutdown.
I highly recommend using a program like YNAB for budgeting and income/expense tracking. It takes some commitment but quickly become second nature. I’ve tracked every dollar in and out since Jan 2016 and it has been immensely helpful.
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The Amazon thing is absolutely brutal. We even have the rewards card, which has a link that pulls up the order, and it’s still hard because they combine shipments, and my wife returns stuff like a crazy person. I gave up after a couple months.
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I’ve used Mint for 4-5 years now and find it pretty good for expense tracking and categorization as well. (It’s hard to switch to try out something new because then you lose all the history). Also a great way to catch unusual activity when you have a lot of cards/accounts open.
I’m laughing at the Amazon conversation because for me too, Ms. JordanIB’s Amazon purchases (which are on a separate Amazon account from mine) is the one and only not inconsequential bucket - and not an inconsequential one - that I can’t categorize unless I ask what every purchase is, and you can imagine how well that is received!
I would imagine YNAB has something similar, but one thing I like on Mint is it’ll log your ATM withdrawals, but then you can manually enter cash expenses that it’ll separate out from the most recent withdrawal. It doesn’t work perfectly and I’m sure I miss things, but it’s a nice way to avoid just having a bit “cash” bucket that you can’t account for.