CLICK HERE to link to the United States Department of Agriculture website
Video Transcript
How much should I spend per month on food? This seems to be the number one question that comes up whenever people start talking about budgeting. Whether it’s in a forum, or a Facebook group, or just talking with friends or family, very quickly the conversation seems to go to “How much do you spend on groceries?” Because it seems to be such a mystery, and there’s such a range. Because from those conversations you hear about these large families that have these crazy low grocery budgets, or these small families that have really high grocery budgets. So how do you know what should you budget? Are you normal? What should you expect? I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find resources on this and didn’t have a lot of luck because it seems I could find things that might say “Well here’s what you should expect to spend for a family of four”, but what if you’re not a family of four? I’m not a family of four. Or they tell you how much you could expect your groceries to go up either next month or next year, but that doesn’t help because that doesn’t give you a starting point.
So all that searching finally led me to the United States Department of Agriculture who puts out this monthly chart (and they update it monthly). There’s a quick peek at it and I will put a link to it on my website so you can get a copy of it there. There are many things I like about this chart; one is that it breaks it down per person in your family, so you can be a family 1 or you can be a family of 10 and you can use this chart to figure out a grocery budget for your family. I also like that it breaks it out by the ages of your children, because a teen will most likely eat more than four-year-old will eat. And it also gives you levels; they have a thrifty plan, a low cost plan, a moderate plan, and a liberal plan. So it’s really good. I like that. And then when I take this to figure out a calculation for my family… we’re a family of six (we have a mom, and dad, a 10-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old, and a 4-year-old), I use those numbers in here and on the thrifty plan it says my monthly groceries would be $900, and on the liberal plan it says almost $1,800. So that’s double almost, so that’s quite a range, but if you go somewhere in the middle part (and maybe this is partly why I like this) that’s pretty close to what our family spends a month on groceries.
Now with groceries we’ll include anything that you buy at a grocery store, so like garbage bags or tinfoil or something like, that we’ll include, but overall though it’s pretty close. I like this chart because I think it’s a good guide for people to use if they’re trying to figure out a budget for their groceries, or a starting point for how much to spend on their groceries.
Action Step
Action step for this video is to figure out a food budget for your family. So click on the link on my website to take you to the US Department of Agriculture spreadsheet, and download a copy of that, and figure out a grocery budget for your family. And when you do that I would love to hear what you think about the number that it came up with. What do you think of the spreadsheet? What do you think of the number it told you? Did it make sense? Was it reasonable? Or if you know of another resource similar to this to help people figure out a grocery budget, I’d love to see that and share that too. But otherwise just click the link and figure out your budget.
That’s it for now!