Budget surprise.
I logged on to Mint earlier today at work, and found myself playing around in the “Trends” section. I’ve had an account for a while now, so I thought it would be a good idea to see where my money went in 2012. I wasn’t going to go through every single purchase. I just wanted to fix anything that had fallen into the uncategorized section and also to make sure there wasn’t any crazy spending that I had done that I hadn’t been conscious of.
I was pretty shocked to find that we had spent over $13,000 on food alone last year ( $13,300.89 to be exact ). This is a combined number between grocery store, restaurant and coffee shop purchases. This is an average of about $1108 monthly. Or $255 weekly! That’s a lot of money to feed 2.5 people. One of my junior co-workers saw $13,000 on the screen and was like “Whoa, I only make like $5,000 more than that in an entire year.”
The breakdown looked like:
- Grocery: $7921 ( $152/week )
- Restaurants: $4834 ( $93/week )
- Coffee Shops: $535 ( $10/week )
- Misc: $10 ( negligible )
That’s a lot of money!
Since the New Year began, we’ve been adjusting to a new food budget and a new, healthier diet, which will save us heaps of money in 2013. In 2012, though, we went through a few different phases of shopping to find the right way ( for us ) to shop. It took much trial and error, and consequently, money as well. We did the coupon thing ( obsessively at times ), we did the big buy-in-bulk stores ( and over-bought ), and we did the method of using 3-4 grocery stores to find the best prices on each item we needed that week ( waste of time ). Finally, our method developed to the point where we spend $100 maximum per week without too much fuss.
Now to address the restaurant and coffee shop spending. 2012 was a financial failure on our part, because we were budgeting ourselves too much money for discretionary spending. When we would write our weekly grocery list, we wouldn’t account for Saturday or Sunday, because we would always plan to eat out all weekend. Laziness and delicious Chipotle burritos got the better of us and I can admit that now.
As time goes on, and we further settle into our home, we cook and eat in more and more. Maybe it’s a monetary thing, maybe we’re just getting better at cooking ( that’s what I’d like to think ). We aren’t going to completely write off going out to eat, because eating out is just one thing we love to do. Plus, our future will involve having more babies, and we would like to take advantage of our time out now while we still can.
The goal for 2013:
- Grocery: $5,200 ( $100/week )
- Restaurants: $2,600 ( $50/week )
- Coffee shops: Make coffee at home
That’s a total budget reduction of $5,500 annually. This is the goal for now, and hopefully we stick with it. Since we have 7 years until our retirement, this would help us save a grand total of $38,500 before we quit our jobs for good!
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