So I’m just one dude and 10k a year just on food seems incredibly high. I don’t go out that often, ~$1600 was at restaurants. I’m not really sure what I’m doing wrong while shopping at grocery stores and want to track grocery purchases better. The store I typically go to doesn’t have online receipts to use.
I’m wondering what kind of apps are available for tracking grocery expenditures that Lemmings would recommend? It would be nice to be able to go back and check prices/sizes of things too, so what is being shrinkflated/skimpflated
I’m not sure about tracking your spending, but I can tell you that you’re grocery shopping is way too wasteful. That’s like $200/week on groceries for one person. Unless you have a very limited diet, you’re paying more than double what you should be at the grocery store. For context, when I get groceries for me and my wife, I rarely spend over $50. Get store brands, buy bigger sizes, and shop at cheaper stores like Aldi. Stop buying frozen and processed garbage; buy fresh meat and vegetables and cook big batches and have leftovers. This time of year is great for a big pot of soup/chili!
I think if I were interested in tracking spending like that, I might just build a simple spreadsheet with dates and costs, maybe add variables for the unusual things like stocking up to have guests to feed or whatever. Sorry I can’t be more helpful on that front. If you’re not experienced with cooking, there are some really good YouTube channels that can teach you some good, versatile recipes that are very budget-friendly.
It really depends on where you live. $200 doesn’t get you that far in places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Especially if you’re cooking for every meal for more than one person for a week.
You’re not wrong. But for context, my wife and I live in Ashburn, VA (NoVA is super expensive but not quite Manhattan or San Francisco expensive). A lot of it comes down to choices though. Of course eggs and bacon for breakfast are not gonna be in the budget I mentioned, but oatmeal with some frozen berries fits just fine. No you can’t get steak to fit in that budget all the time, but if you have a vegetarian meal every once in a while then you get some flexibility in your budget to allow steak sometimes because meat is way more expensive than a can of black beans.
I also make my lunches and pack them for when I’m at work, so that’s a lot of the food I eat and it’s way cheaper than it would be if I ordered something somewhere, and it doesn’t take much time to make a whole batch of sandwiches for the week. Idk I grew up poor, so these things are just in my nature, and now even though I don’t have to be so frugal I still choose to because it just doesn’t make sense not to.
I don’t think it’s as simple as coming down to choice. Planning, shopping, cooking, and cleaning takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort that not every person can afford even if they can afford ingredients. It’s not uncommon for people in the city to come home exhausted after 70 hours work week and hour long commutes.
Sometimes it’s not physically or mentally possible to sustain the kind of min-maxing lifestyle of cooking under a tight budget. Cooking is hard, cooking affordably is even harder. Sometimes, having a steak for dinner is one of the few things that keeps people happy enough to not kill themselves in an exploitative work culture while being crushed by unaffordable housing.
I don’t think OP is necessary overspending because it really depends on where they live, how many hours they work, what their living situation is like, how much of their own mental load they carry.
I’ve lived on a tight budget before. For a time I made do with $30 a week in an expensive town, albeit almost a decade ago. I skimmed on everything I could and bought as many $1 bags of spoiled vegetables as I could, trimmed off all the moldy parts, and just made whatever vegetable soup I could every week. This is one of like 50 other things I had to do to get by. And it wasn’t great for my mental health. It sucked to have to spend so much time and energy when I had so few hours left in a day to do all this.
Living cheap has a cost too. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that OP is necessary choosing to waste money when we don’t know where they live or what else is going on in their life.
$50 for two people for a week? That’s about $1.20 per meal and rivals what companies like Aramark spend per inmate/school child per meal. I have a tough time believing this holds true for more than a week unless you’re just eating beans and rice.
I had taken a picture of two receipts to show that buying one bag of groceries from Giant costs as much as most of our week’s grocery run. I would typically buy a little more than this, and what I would buy in addition is the pricier things admittedly, but it’s usually $35-50 depending on what needs replenishing and what’s on sale.
I’m looking at that receipt and it would be one day of food in our household. One supper for 4, and 3 lunches (one kid gets free lunch, their school gives it to all students), one round of breakfast , maybe. You eat this all week? Two cans of beans? What is your calorie goal for a day?
I hate to say it, but one way to do it is using a spreadsheet. Every time you shop, you create two new columns – the item and it’s individual price, and at the bottom the total.
At the end of the year, you can add up and graph the totals.
That was our approach, with columns for different stores to identify the better price points where we were buying an identical/equivalent item. Turns out Costco tends to have the best pricing for non-perishable items.
I would focus on it the from a different angle. Instead of tracking grocery spending, I would set a number that you aim to not go over for a given month. Based upon the numbers you provided you spend an average of $700 per month on groceries. If you, for example, aimed to start with reducing your by 50% to $350 per month you would save $4400 yearly. That’s a sizable sum of money that you could put towards a vacation or a buttload of smaller purchases.
As far as how you could go about saving that much, I would advise setting a limit on both how many grocery trips you make and how much you allow yourself to spend on each trip. So lets say you decide on about 4 trips a month (roughly weekly). In that case, spending $80 per trip would safely stay within the budget of $350. There would even be ~$30 leftover for a couple of mini trips for one or a couple items.
To help stay in the budget, it might be helpful to take a small notepad along and log how much each item costs at as soon as you put it in your cart. You can stretch your dollar further by buying the products that tend to be more out of sight and less convenient. The products that are highly visible like the endcaps of aisles and that are at eye level tend to be the more expensive options since they are usually rented by the brands to get the prime attention real estate. Stores with a less than traditional layout, like Aldi, are also a great way to save since they are usually cheaper and let you get more bang for your buck.
Another useful practice might be a simple grocery list. After you write it out but before you go in the store, you could order the items based on how important they are to have. Something like sweets < Potato chips < crackers < fruit < veggies < presliced meat < spreads / oils < bread. If it seems like your running total for the trip won’t cover all that’s on your list then you could forgo some of the less important or more expensive items. When calculating the running total keep in mind that there’s usually a ~10% tax on that will be added to the total. So $70 worth of groceries would end being ~$77 after checkout.
As far as apps, I’ve tried some of them and I found they were too tedious for my taste. Even receipts often obscure what the actually product is your getting with a product shorthand that is illegible. That’s why I have ended up breaking out a smallish notepad for tracking purchases instead of using receipts.
I guess this comment got a little long winded for lemmy, but oh well.
I use the price tags in the store. They show how much each thing costs. If it’s too expensive I don’t buy it. Make potatoes and chicken your reference point. If it’s more expensive think about a substitute. Next trick is that I think what I’m going to cook before I go to store, check what I’m missing and put it on a list. Then I buy things on that list. This helps me not to throw away food.
If you do both things and still spend $10.000 on food you’re only choice is to eat less or eat things you like less which is silly if you can afford it. Tracking each transaction is an interesting hobby but will consume your time and not help you much more than simply being concious about what you buy and not buying things you don’t need.
Get one credit card you only use at the grocery. If you get one with cash back or points you will get money back.
