How much money should you spend on your groceries each month? I feel like it’s a trick question. The amount you should be spending on groceries for your family is the amount that works for your family. No one else can determine that for you.
However, if you are the type that prefers to have some guidelines you are in luck. The USDA (United States Daprtment of Agriculture) has taken all the guess work out by calculating four levels of food plan budgets for families of different sizes and and ages. You can choose from the thrifty plan, low-cost plan, moderate-cost plan, or the liberal plan.
According to the chart a family of 4 with young children should be able to eat at home for $557.70 a month if they had all of the lowest cost meats, fruits, and veggies.
I consider myself very thrifty so I wanted to see how we faired. I went to Iowa State University’s research page where they have a calculator that allows you to enter the age and gender of each family member along with how many meals are eaten away from home.
The results according to the USDA’s Low-Cost Food Plan indicates that we could spend $211.82 per week ($917.81 per month) for our household.
I was pleased to see that answer because we spend less than that amount. The USDA food budget is just for food and our grocery budget also includes our paper products and toiletries.
So how much does my messy family spend? Drum roll please…
Less than $600 a month!
As far as the budget we usually spend $145 a week on all of our groceries. We also eat out about twice a week so that doesn’t count all of our food, but it does include diapers, paper towels, batteries, saran wrap, toilet paper, shampoo and all that other stuff that you pick up when grocery shopping.
There are a couple things to consider with these numbers. First of all, I am on the WIC nutrition program which I will talk about later this week. That saves us about $100 per month. Also, this is a give or take number. We don’t follow our budget to a T all the time. Even without WIC or fluctuating receipts we are still below the USDA’s Low Cost Food Plan and I feel like we eat well.
We obviously don’t skimp on our meat and I am not a big couponer either. So how do we feed a family of 5 (6 if you include the baby) for below the average american’s food budget? I am going to be explaining all week long so I hope you will stick around.
This is day 23 of Captain of the kitchen a 31 day series for the month of October. To catch up on the rest of the series click HERE.
This is very interesting, I definitely need to look at it more. I think we spend about $100 a week for our family of 4 including paper products and laundry items. We have veggie based meals a couple times a week, breakfast for dinner and try to stay on budget. We eat out about once a week.