Someone asked me the other day, “Approximately how much money do you spend on groceries per month, and how many people does it feed? How often do you eat out?”
My response, verbatim, was this:
“We spend $200 on groceries a month, and it feeds two people. Occasionally we go over, if we’re having a party, or want to cook a special meal whose ingredients cost a bit more, so I budget $250.
We go out to eat once a week, usually spending about $20 a week. Sometimes we eat out a little more, so I usually budget $25 a week or $100 a month.
Grand total, we usually spend around $300 on food each month.“
That seems really good, to feed two people on $200-$300 a month. My dad, who admittedly buys organic, spends at least $400 a month for just him (groceries and eating out twice a week). The USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) suggests that the average family of four spends between $700 and $900 on food per month, depending on what they buy. Even $700 seemed a little high to me, but Trent at The Simple Dollar says that he ran the numbers a few times, and his family of four spends right around $770 a month.
In retrospect, our budget of $200 on groceries seems a little low, considering that a family of two on the moderate-cost plan spends $530 a month. But then I thought about it, and here’s the thing: my husband and I both work in restaurants. This means that we each get at least one free meal a day. And if we’re working a double shift, we get two free meals a day.
We both eat breakfast at home every day, we eat lunch at work 5 days a week, and dinner at work at least 3 days a week. That’s 10-16 meals that we’re not eating at home, out of 21 meals a week (assuming 3 meals a day x 7 days a week). More than half of our meals a week are free.
Admittedly some of the food we buy (with the intention of cooking at home) goes bad because we don’t have time to do anything with it, but I wonder how much more we’d be spending if we worked in a different industry.
Which begs the question, how much do you spend on groceries in a month? Are you close to the reported national average? Over? Under?
