Food Budget
 

For the average American family...

In the 1950's food was the largest budget item at 29.7%.

In the 1960's it was 24.3%

In the 1970's it dropped to 19.3%

In the 1980's only 15%

In the 1990's 13.8%

In the 2000's a meager 13.1%

How can that be, when it costs so much to go to the supermarket these days?
Because the average income went from $4,287 to $50,302.

Just wait.

The Federal Reserve is in the process of forcing inflation to go up,
and income of working folk will too. For others, things will just get harder.

Wow. According to that chart, the average family is now spending $445 a month on groceries. Less than $15 a day for a family? That's just absurd.

It's not even remotely true, those numbers are fantasy. easily $200 a week for four of us, prolly more, and we don't buy pre-made food.

That's average, you high-on-the-hoggers. :lol:
And from the sources, I'd bet that doesn't include soap, paper, and all the other non-food you drag home from the supermarket.

What I would like to see is a comparison between 4 main budgets in a family, namely :
1) food
2) housing
3) transportation
4) kid's education

I usually end up buying a fair amount of non-foodstuffs, including laundry detergent, which is darn expensive stuff.

I also buy a lot of TV dinners, which are much more expensive than raw ingredients. I spend around $75 each time I hit the store, unless I've really, really tried to eat everything that's not nailed down before I go back (in which case there are Wawa visits to replenish milk and bread).

We don't usually spend more than $15 a day for 5 big eaters. We don't buy expensive cuts of meat, we don't buy much organic or out-of-season. We do buy in bulk when there's a good sale. We live in a city where there are many grocery stores and therefore more competitiion to keep the prices low. We could easily eat for less if we chose to (cutting out fresh fruit and veg, for a start.....) Also, I guess we eat to live rather than live to eat.

here an example:

breakfast: cereal or toast. Max 50c per person (I only buy cereals at $2 or less per box (yes, i wait for the sales), main cereals are generic brand cornflakes, rice crispies, oat loopy things....), Bread is $1.80 italian loaf from supermarket (unsliced)

lunch: brown bagged for the kids and beest, same for me out of the fridge, up to $1 each, maybe. bread, pasta or rice or home-made pizza, piece of fruit, fun size candy bar, cheese or meat, go-gurt, milk to drink (decanted from gallon jug), hebe, beest and I sometimes have leftovers instead.

dinner: choosing something mid-range expense: Spaghetti Bologneise (sauce will make two-three meals). about a buck for 1.5lb pasta (always bought on sale, never pay more than 67c/lb), around $5 for ground chuck (just under 2lb usually) $2 for tinned tomatos, $1 bacon, 50c onions/garlic, 50c-$1 for accompanying vegetables -so around $3-4 per meal for the sauce, so around $5 for the whole family

tea coffee coke snacks etc might add another couple of dollars to the daily bill.

so that's just about $15 I guess. sometimes we might have steak for dinner -if it's on sale- or fish (ditto) which will make the cost higher, But sometimes we just have pasta with a tuna sauce and peas and that's much lower.

I think it would be hard for us to live on much less than $15/day, but I don't think that statistic is unreasonable. Generic mac n cheese in a box is pretty cheap if you can stomach it. Some people have to.

If we don't include soap, paper towels, pet supplies, adult beverages and that expensive shampoo my daughter makes us buy for her lovely platinum blonde hair . . . :yelgreedy I'd guess we spend an average of $80 a week just on food at the grocery.

This does not include the kids' lunches bought at school, which I need to work on decreasing --my son can easily spend $7 a day in his cafeteria, which is astounding to me. It also doesn't hubby's lunch every day; he refuses to pack because he's so damn picky (he's a mail carrier, so not someone who has access to an office fridge/microwave). Doesn't include all the pizzas and the fast-food and sit-down dinners we get because I really hate cooking and, though I usually do it anyway, I look for any excuse not to. :)

However, we do sit down as a family and have meals together most nights, which I've heard only 20% of U.S. families do on a regular basis (I'm too lazy to look up the exact stats or source) so I think we're doin' something right anyhow.

In my grocery store, the cheapest ground chuck is $4/lb. The kind we buy is $6/lb. A dollar in the (non-organic) produce section will get you one red onion, or 2 cucumbers, or 1 1/3 bell peppers. Pasta's about the same around here as what you were saying, though. Maybe it's just because you live closer to viable farmland than we do. :)

could be. but that's exactly my point, it really depends on location. I forgot to add that we grow some of our own veggies in the summer. That helps too. Cheapest ground chuck here is just over $2/lb, I buy the stuff that's priced nearer $4/lb, but I wait until it's on sale at nearer $2-3 then buy tonnes and freeze it*. I buy onions in the pre-packed 3lb bags for less than $3. A bag will usually last me until the next time they go on sale at around $2 per bag :)

*(Well to be accurate, I buy tonnes and beest freezes it while rolling his eyes at me because it's gonna be a squeeze in the freezer.......)

It's simple market economics. You grow the beef in Texas and ship it to Michigan... that lowers the cost :confused:

I'm sure there are commercial beef ranches in Texas somewhere... but the only ones I know of are of the all-natural, grass-fed, hoity-toity variety. I'm pretty sure our cheap beef is shipped in from Mexico.

Does this budget include fast food, going out to eat at restaurants and/or convenience store shopping?

One would presume so. Makes little or no difference to us.

Tonight's meal:

Boeuf Bourguignonne variation

Beef: $3-4ish (hard to say -from freezer, part of larger purchase but we usually freeze in approx $3 portions. this one looked on the larger side, I never pay more than $3/lb becasue there's always a BOGOF or similar sale on some cut or other, so I stock up) Onion 25c bacon 50c mushrooms 75c, stock cubes and flour negligable, let's say 25c. half glass of wine, 50c spaghetti $1, Asparagus $1 butter for asparagus 20c.

total cost approx $8 for a nice meal for 5. This is probably towards the expensive end of our range.

You're splitting $1 of asparagus between 5 people?

nah, three of us. but it was on sale too :) we ended up eating the full $1.50 worth, though, because it wasn't worth leaving a little bit to go off, even though it was more than we would normally eat in one serving. Asparagus is really cheap in Michigan -99c/lb is not an uncommon sale price.

Just stopped at the farmer on the way home ground beef 3.29 #

last night was mac n cheese (using spiral pasta rather than mac) made from scratch, with peas (frozen). pre-swim meet meal -not exciting but does the trick. pasta 70c, milk 50c, cheese $1.70, cornstarch 10c peas 50c $3 total. Post swim meet they had seconds, then cereal total additional cost $1. Plus there is enough left over for my lunch, not sure if anyone else took some for theirs. So that more than makes up for yesterdays overage (and yesterday's leftovers were my lunch yesterday :yum:)

that's a good price fresh from the farm. I'd pay that in order to support a local business and be confident of the quality. Unfortunately, the "local home business" option here is not so local, the price is nearer $10/lb because it's organic and I'm not so trusting of the supplier/their store. And it's on the other side of town and seriously inconvenient.

Yeah, it's funny around here. There are so many farms and some of them try the whole $10/# boutique, grass-fed, humanely smothered with a soft feather pillow thing, but no one up here has the coin to buy that, so those folks truck their stuff to NYC to the farm markets. Down there, where people are so wowed by carharts and calloused hands and a few burlap bags and wooden bushel baskets they don't really blink at the price, I'm guessing they feel the mystique of authenticity.

Mostly up here the small time farmers are raising on such a small scale that they don't really need to go the route of agribiz. The stuff is probably a lot better than anything from applegate farms because they're only raising seven or eight beefers or four or five hogs. Half of my friends raise an animal or two for food and then one or two more to sell. Some years when we are more flush we'll buy a half pig or 1/4 beef and store it in the freezer. It's anywhere from 2.85 to 3.50 a pound packaged. I think it was 1.70 hanging weight, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, it's cheap and you can go pet the thing all year and feed it too if you want. It's pretty transparent.

My junk mail today says fresh ground chuck is on sale at $1.79 this week. I may be stocking up if it really is the fresh and not the plastic tubes.

My sister must think I live in dire times. She sent me this. I offered to send photos of my pantry and freezer. But she's right. Because prices are going up after the COLA thing.
Dear old sis.
"I'm going to send you a check so you can stock up on groceries. Prices are going up more soon."
BTW. I just made Blueberry jam.

Chuck steak, or gravy beef or whatever you want to call it is near enough to $10/kg here which is roughly $5/pound I guess. I don't recall seeing it much cheaper than that for years.

Ground beef, no matter what quality is never any cheaper than that. In fact, the only way to get it at a reasonable price is to buy in bulk which is fine for most people I suppose, but not so good for old people living alone.

Groceries in general are just expensive here though. I'm pretty sure we've covered this before.

If you buy in bulk and store it in a freezer, I wonder what the energy costs add to the total cost of meat.

Depends if you're running the freezer anyway...... But freezers are not terrible energy-suckers because you don't open and close them all the time. We have two, one for longer term storage and one for things we might need several times a week. like ice cream :)

Asparagus yesterday was $3.99/lb here. !!!!

But sliced roast beef was $1- $2 a package, and 1 1/2 packages ($3 ish) fed 4 of us quite large deef dips for dinner, with enough for one left over for a lunch today.

If it's 3.99 it ain't going in the cart, that's for sure.

deef = bastard offspring of bull and doe? or cow and stag?

There's a wide range in freezer efficiency, but it probably costs between $150 and $200 per year in electricity for a typical 16 to 20 cubic foot chest freezer.

So about 50c a day........ that's more than worth it on meat savings alone, nevermind the financial benefit of being able to freeze leftovers and the convenience of keeping frozen foods so your shopping habits are not dictated by your shelf space.

Btw, last night's dinner was another cheapie:

Jacket Spuds (75c) with butter (50c) beans (1.50) cheese (75c) bacon (50c) onion (10c) -$4.10ish. and cereal for the kids after swimming again.

Looking at our menu, we're not doing so well on the veggie count this week. must address that tonight....

If we have nothing on except the two fridges (both large with freezers) and a few appliances on standby with the computer on, our energy bill is 6 cents per hour. I don't think fridges cost that much to run. The oven sure does though. That's up around 50 cents an hour!

plus the initial cost of the second freezer...

In my freezer are two packs of 500g minced beef (similar to ground I believe) @ £1.94 each
1kg = £3.88 or $6.25
1kg = 2.2lb
$2.84/lb Edited thanks to Ali's better maths

This is low fat steak mince from the reduced cabinet though, which is why I bought two.
The sell-by date was the date on which I bought them, and froze them same day. So they are decent mince, and not Value Mince.

Value Mince (from which you have to skim half the volume in fat - I don't knoow what chuck is, but I don't think it's this) is £2.50 per kg.
£2.50 = $4.03
1kg = 2.20lb
$1.83/lb

SG, I think you've got an error in your calculations for the first group re: lb to kg ratio.

You were completely right - I've edited it to show the right amount.
I'd worked it all out (no mean feat for a women as baffled by numbers as I am - what with having to convert EVERYTHING!) and then lost the post.
So I re-did it all again in a minor strop.
Thanks for noticing and making the re-do make sense :)

a 20 CF freezer is fucking enormous. Those figures are also for older freezers. A new energy star 22cf freezer uses about 500kwh per year. We pay .05 per kwh that's $25 a year.

We actually have a 14CF freezer and it uses something like 375kwh /yr we keep it full (more efficient) and in the basement where the temp is between 50f-70f all year.

5 cents is cheap, too.

which is also barely significant, given how long they last.

- - - -


Seems to me like a whole lot of people* got a whole lot of excuses for spending too much on food. Which is fine, your money, your choice. My point was merely that it's possible to eat well on a grocery bill of that size. Maybe not everywhere and maybe not when you have special dietary needs, but your average family in an average cookie-cutter neighborhood in average suburb can do it, so I see no reason to disbelieve that that is the average a family spends on food.

(*not necessarily posters here and no individual is targeted by this comment, I have no idea who shops in bulk and who owns a chest freezer and I'm assuming those pointing out the downsides of this approach are more about playing devil's advocate than defending their personal habits mmmmkay)

You're proof it can be done. The question of the 13.1% being average, I'm not so sure. I'm not even convinced $50,302 is the average income, I'd have to look that one up. Or maybe it's average for the sample group?

I was merely pointing out some things that may not have been included in the numbers.
Sorry for attempting to be accurate.
My food costs are far below the average. If I took out the "treats" we have on the weekend, It would be even less.

Oh, I just thought of one more. Did they include school lunches in the current figures?