Grocery, yes, everyone needs to eat, drink and enjoy the best food which is also human’s favorite. However, spending money on groceries is also a big question, especially the family with lots of members. People use to push groceries to the bottom of the list of expenses and rarely think that it makes a critical impact to the family’s daily cost. We are afraid that our family is not surely fed enough, then we overspend in a bad way. Additionally, it causes a huge stress for people who manage family finance with every single dollar.
So, the article today is going to help you how a family financial manager can calculate the grocery budget but still bringing our family enough good food and reach our money goals.
How much should it be in the grocery budget?
People often have no idea how much they’re spending on groceries
and try to aim for a ridiculously low number to spend when they try and cut
this expense. It is not an effective way.
Here’s a simple exercise that will show you exactly what you have been spending.
✤ Print out the last three months of your bank statement. Yes, it is three months.
✤ Choose your favorite couples of color highlighters.
✤ Go through and color all the grocery store purchases one color.
✤ Highlight any restaurants, GrabEats, DoorDash, food delivery etc as another color.
✤ Any splurges for snacks at the gas station, gets marked with a third color.
(If you have any other ways you buy groceries, continue the process of highlighting what you have spent with another color)
✤ Total up each color/category
✤ Divide the total by 3.
✤ Put this amount into your budget as a line item for each category (groceries, eating out/delivery, snack splurges)
Remember, this is the starting amount to put into your budget. At this point I want you to keep the three categories separate (groceries, eating out/delivery, snack splurges) so we can address each one and make necessary changes.
So now we’re ready to tackle the big question, how much should I spend to provide food for my family?
How to determine how much you should spend for your family
In order to answer that question, let’s consider a few factors below:
✤ How many people are there in your family? And who they are? (As it may vary because of ages, males, females – because a teenage boy will eat a whole lot more than the elder)
✤ Do you want organic food, vegan or a special diet food?
✤ How often do we want to eat out/have food delivered?
✤ Your income and financial goals in the short term and long term
✤ Your family value regarding the others (if your family has to)
As above questions, you see that it depends drastically how your family members want to be, their food lifestyle, their aging, your income, final goals and how your family wants to be in other’s eyes (if any).
Then, I figured out that nutrition is one of the factors we can adjust which is either good for your health and also critical to reduce your grocery budget. Reduce as much as possible food that entertains you such as fast food, food by delivery, food in the luxury restaurants. Replace this food lifestyle with a healthy lifestyle which you can cook by yourself at home.
In this process, I made a choice to spend more on groceries and buy ingredients to make most everything from scratch. Personally, I want to feed
my family food that nourishes them, helps them grow, and stays healthy.
See while I was getting great deals on boxed/packaged items that were premade, my grocery budget was too low to begin with. Yes, while you buy things in bulk with boxes or packages, you may get huge deals.
There’s no judgement on how you feed your family… but let’s take time to consider and have your own answer.