Food Budget

Depending on what data source you use, on average people spend about $200 a month on food, with 40 percent of that being out of the house and 60 percent at home.  For our family of five, that would be $400 a month eating out and another $600 a month on groceries for a cool $1,000 a month or $12,000 a year.  $12,000 may seem like a lot, but note that it works out to about $2.20 per person per meal.  Are we above or below that?  

I do the grocery shopping in our house so I can respond to that part off the top of my head.  Generally speaking, my weekly shopping cart totals anywhere from $150 to $250, and on average I think it probably works out to about $170-$180 a week.  So that's about $9,000 a year.  By the way, we benefit from our kids getting fed lunch by school, either in the school when schools are open or via a take-home box during this pandemic.  Which is not a trivial amount of food that we're not directly paying for.

As for eating out, we are in the habit of ordering take-out once a week, which runs anywhere from $30 to $70 and I'd say $50 a week is a good average.  Plus maybe four to six times a year, I'll take Amy or the older kids out for a nice dinner, so all in maybe you're talking $3,000 a year.  Not included in this total are any business-related meals (far fewer nowadays, of course, but way back when that might be at least one dinner and a couple of lunches each work week) which are not coming out of my pocket.

So lookie that: as un-average as our crazy clan is in other ways, we appear to be right on the nose with average food costs, although our eat-out vs. dine-in split is closer to 25/75 rather than 40/60.  What about you?  I suspect I have friends who spend more and others who spend less.