Choosing how much to budget for your family’s food is very personal. I’m transparent about how much we spend hoping to encourage families who can’t afford to budget much. I know on the other side there are families who can afford to spend more and feel guilty when they see our budget. That’s NOT the intent at all. If you can afford to spend more, do it without guilt.
For years my rule of thumb was $50 per person per month. As soon as I became pregnant I upped the budget $50 to help with a few extra convenience foods while I dealt with pregnancy illness. After the baby was born the higher budget allowed me to afford weight loss friendly foods and protein powders to lose the baby weight. It was baby related food expense even though the baby still didn’t eat from the table.
At my old rule of thumb our family food budget would be $400. We lived with that for the last few years out of necessity. Tuition for Christian school, music lessons, kids activities, and home and auto repairs were out of control. We could hardly breathe. Last spring when school and dance lessons ended for the season we decided to take part of those payments and increase our food budget to $500 a month. Then again this fall we upped it to $550.
Realistically I’d like that food budget to be a little higher. If our income stays the same, to increase the food budget another category has to decrease. We have been looking at our budget overall to see where we could find room to breathe. We made the hard decision to put 3 of our kiddoes into public school (they are doing great), drop out of dance lessons, and cut back on music lessons. We also limited our sports to one session a year. These decisions were hard in the moment but have left us more family time–a big win. While that helped a lot, the money is going towards looming expenses instead of food.
So how do you go about figuring out what your food budget should be? There’s going to be some back and forth figuring as you plug in your numbers. We started by putting in our mortgage, utilities and other necessary bills (subtracting from our take home pay as we went.) Then as we put in the rest of our budget items and the money ran out, we looked back at the previously budgeted items to see which ones were adjustable. We found food to be the only large necessary budget item that had a good deal of wiggle room. We slid the adjustable categories around until we came up with something we thought might work. We tried it for a month, then next month adjusted the new budget based on our experiences.
The government has some recommendations for how much food should cost. They base their food stamp amounts on the thrifty plan, but have 3 other plans that allow for bigger budgets. On their thrifty plan my family should budget $1,265. That would be a DREAM! Crown Financial Ministries recommends budgeting 9% of your income on food. For us that’s a lot less than $1265 and is a good place to start.
What do you do if the food budget you need to stick to is WAYYY below what you’re used to? Don’t worry. We’ll walk you through it later this week. Your homework for today and tomorrow is to come up with a target number.
This is Day 2 of our Series: Shrink Your Food Budget
I go to Dirty Don’s
This is a good post. In 2014, I was very much focused on losing baby weight (had my 2nd baby at 42, eek!) and our total grocery bill was a little over $10k for the year, for a family of four in (expensive) So Cal.
In 2015, I cut that down to $5700. I was very proud. It’s quite above where we were in 2009, for example, but we added a second kid, and I switched to fewer carbs and more protein.
I’m aiming for $6k this year (kids are growing!)
You are so right to point out “childcare” expenses that don’t even include the baby eating 😉
That there are expenses related to something even if it’s not directly the person, activity, event…. Like food before and after pregnancy, not just sports registrations but also equipment, team snacks, traveling, etc.
Also I appreciate your openness in sharing bc you’ve always given me a guideline to have in mind. I used to ask friends but like you said, it’s different for everyone and some would be private and others had no idea. So I have learned so much from your sharing. I know that’s why you do it and I thank you! I’m going to do the homework!
9% of income for food would be much to low for us. Our food budget is between 20-25%.
Wow..yes… 9% of the budget for us… If I’m calculating that based on take home pay (what was that based on..makes a HUGE difference in Ontario, because our taxes and deductions are very high), would put us a just under $400 a month. Which would be awesome, but is entirely not possible. Or..maybe it is?! And I’m just not very good at being frugal.
We’re likely at close to $800-1000 a month), but honestly, my receipts always have things other than food on them, so I’m kind of half guessing. I know! It’s terrible that I don’t even know exactly how much we spend on groceries. I guess that’s my homework. Track it. Figure it out. JUST THE FOOD.
Food is absolutely the budget area where we have the most room for improvement! In January 2016, we brought our food expenditures down by nearly half, mostly by cutting back on eating out. I’m looking forward to the rest of this series to see how we can keep our progress going…. Our income may be getting smaller still this summer and I want to be ready!