Spending Habits: Food & Drink

[Al in Ohio]

I think this is one area where family budgets widely vary. My sister and her husband eat out often and spend thousands per month dining out. They had no idea how much others save by buying healthy groceries and cooking most meals at home.

My family of three spends $600 -$700 per month on groceries, another $60 per week for Blue Apron meals (feeds three of us for three restaurant quality meals each week), and maybe another $60 per month at the farmers market for organic meat and produce. Then we eat out for dinner once or twice per month ($75 each time).

So for three of us we spend about $1200 per month max.

I have an espresso maker and we make cappuccino or lattes or a pot of bold drip Starbucks Cafe Verona at home daily. We get free Starbucks drink offers quite often also.

And we eat well. Often I am grilling steaks, burgers or salmon Etc.


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[2017ish]

I think this is one area where family budgets widely vary. My sister and her husband eat out often and spend thousands per month dining out. They had no idea how much others save by buying healthy groceries and cooking most meals at home.

...

For sure. We can't believe how much people spend on eating out so many nights--while they can't believe how much we spend on wines and on our 4-6 splurge restaurant visits each year.

To each their own--although prudent to save a healthy percentage before going nuts on groceries/restaurants/booze.

 

[RetiredGypsy]

I could happily feed myself on $75/month, but I could live on variations of rice and bean burritos three times a day forever, snacking on melons and other cheap fruit in between. Call it an even hundred if I wanted a few dollar menu hamburgers and a cheap bottle of bourbon.

Since I'm living with a girlfriend now, it's almost impossible to keep the budget under $400 a month; usually it's closer to $550-600.

 

[aaronc879]

I average a little less than $200/mo for a single 30-something male. That includes toiletries. I don't drink wine and rarely eat out.

 

[Gone4Good]

"Our" favorite (aka, DW's) is pinot--either sonoma fruit bombs, or Willamette Valley food friendly,

Talking about pinot, Willamette, and fruit bombs . . . David Hill Vineyard's Black Jack knocked our socks off when we visited their estate some years back. It's supposedly harvested from some of the oldest vines in the valley.

It will be quite different when we start traveling in earnest. No way to duplicate what we can do at home in this area.

No. We sadly lack a wine cellar. Or even a rack.

But the nice thing about traveling is that great wines are dirt cheap in Europe. Not the first growth stuff, which is expensive everywhere. But plenty of awesome local stuff that doesn't have a huge export market is just lying around for pennies on the dollar.

 

[Options]

My entertainment budget has surprisingly fallen since retirement, and I believe it's because I've cut out those $5 cafe mochas (actually, coffeehouse I used to get them from closed and I refuse to *@)*) money away at Starbucks).

Utilities are up, as I'm home more. OTOH, gasoline costs have fallen through the floor as I use the car only once a week (I live in a "walkable neighborhood", where almost everything is within walking distance, or very short driving distance). I eat out only socially, and refuse to waste money on "fine dining", as I have no real interest in food.

Last Saturday was the first time I've paid to see a movie in over a year, and that was only because the friend I saw it with loves movies. For the $16 I spent for the movie, and $14 for popcorn/coke, I got to wade through a mass of humanity in the form of endless tourists blocking every inch of the 15 feet wide sidewalks on Hollywood Boulevard (walked in the street to go around at one point), watch 1/2 hour of "Screenvision" (commercials), and another 1/2 hour of previews before the movie even started. I told this friend she is the only person on earth I would do this for. Usually,Youtube and Hulu Free are my go-to movie sources.

 

[Retch The Grate]

Looks like approximately $10500 in groceries and $5500 in restaurants for me last year. Restaurants are usually split 50/50 with my girlfriend so I wouldn't be surprised if as a household there's another $4k in restaurant expenses. Not sure what her share of grocery expenditures were last year, we alternate paying but I tend to pay for them more frequently. Food is the one area I wonder about being able to create a bunch of extra savings, but then I really like going out for sushi...

 

[rodi]

As my boys have entered the teen years (read that - bottomless pits) our grocery budget has ticked up. We're averaging $1100/month for groceries (that includes wine and booze, toilet paper and shampoo, and pretty much anything I buy at Costco, Vons, or Sprouts.)

We don't eat out as much - When we're not travelling we average about $120/month... Most months are < $100 - but then there will be social occasions where we eat out more. (Friends or family visiting for example).

All of this was for a family of 4... 2 of whom are the aforementioned walking eating machines.

 

[pb4uski]

$250-$750/week is a lot more than what we spend. According to Quicken we spend about $3k a year but we are no longer working. This is just dining out, not groceries.

 

[Fedup]

Spending Habits: Food &amp; Drink

That seems odd. Do you have an explanation ?

I don't have an explanation. I need to look closer at my bill. I was surprised that utilities went down. Gas went down from $50 to $25. Water bill is down, perhaps because I swim at the local pool and use the shower there.


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[Sunset]

Everyone has made me curious about accurate numbers, so I've downloaded an app for my phone to track expenses.

I figure if it's on me, it's easy to enter as I spend, rather than get a pile of receipts that just don't tempt me to enter into excel.

 

[YVRRocketSurgery]

Pre-retirement, no kids:

2014
Groceries: $4281
Eating Out: $7110
Alcohol: $849

2015
Groceries: $4843
Eating Out: $6934
Alcohol: $991

Groceries, Eating Out, and Alcohol spec out to about 1/3 of our core spend (which we define as everything except travel). We kind of eat out too much: work lunches 2-3 times a week, food cart type snacks, and a restaurant meal maybe twice a week. Most of our restaurant meals don't top $80 and are generally sub $40 but the $5-10 lunches and snacks add up. We try to justify it bit as our entertainment which we don't spend a lot on and since we're somewhat foodies.
We also travel about 6 weeks of the year and categorize meals on the road under travel except for daytrips.

 

[Ronstar]

I don't track DW's finances, and she buys the groceries. But as far as eating out post retirement:

2016 Jan- Mar
$1356 Restaurants
$229 Alcohol

2015
$4823 Restaurants
$437 Alcohol

 

[daylatedollarshort]

I budget several hundred a month on groceries for two. These days I usually shop at discount stores like Grocery Outlet and only shop at the retail stores for loss leaders, which cut our bill in half compared to when I shopped at stores like Safeway for most of the groceries and didn't watch the sales.

We eat out a couple of times a week, usually ethnic food like Vietnamese, Thai or Mexican, often with some kind of special, a Groupon or coupon. It usually doesn't cost us too much more than eating at home, so that is maybe $100 extra over the cost of groceries a month.

For entertainment,we do a lot with comp ticket subscriptions and nonprofit / reciprocal membership programs so other than the annual or monthly membership charges for those, most of our weekly events are free or fairly low cost. Plus there are a lot of free parks, festivals, outdoor concerts and other events in our area. A person who calls himself Johnny Funcheap keeps an online list which has been a great find for our ER budget.

 

[Retire2013]

$150 per month. I rarely spend money on alcohol. 3-4 bottle of wine a year. Nor do I go to nice restaurants.

$150 per month on food? This seems remarkably low. I am impressed. Do you mind sharing more information? Where do you shop? What type of ingredients do you buy? Do you shop at Costco etc.? And buy bulk, eat some now and freeze the rest? Please share. I've never heard of anyone with this low a food budget.

 

[KmmFIdreamer]

Our budget: Groceries $300/month, eat out $160 - $200/month, Alcohol - $10 to 20 maybe. This does not include household supplies/cleaning stuff.

This is for 3 of us....

DS works in a restaurant and does bring home stuff every once in a while (some of it is experiments gone wrong though like the recent mango pie - yuck!!). We eat a lot of stir-fry, pasta, soups, and egg dishes and minimize the amount of red meat in our diet.

We buy rice in 25lb sacks. Veggies are usually whatever is in season and cheap though occasionally I supplement with frozen or canned. Everything else we use is bought on sale or with coupons. I pick up meat on the sales and freeze it for later use - I always have plenty of pork and chicken to just pull out and thaw as needed.

Our eating out is rarely anything fancy - pizza, sub sandwiches, local mexican or asian places, and the occasional burger. Once in a while we go out for a nice steak meal - maybe every 3 or 4 months. In March we went to Morton's and blew our eat out budget so I just cut out the pizzas and subs for the rest of the month. I made my own homemade ones for much less instead.....

 

[Totoro]

I average about 3k - 4k a year on food&drink, including eating out.

It also includes the proverbial coffee at starbucks and such (or Ikea for 0.75 with free refills).

 

[ElizabethT]

2014
Groceries - $5,200 ($100 a week, food only, two ER's)
Restaurants - $2,547
Wine/Beer - $1,344

2015
Groceries - $5,200 (" ")
Restaurants - $2,997
Wine/Beer - $1,647

2016
Groceries - $5,200 budgeted (" ")
Restaurants - $3,600 budgeted
Wine/Beer - $2,000 budgeted

The upward Restaurant spend is a result of our evolving ER preferences. In our early ER years, cooking at home was a priority due to the usual fears about running out of $ before life years. As we've relaxed and settled in, we have deliberately bumped the Restaurant spend to allow for regular fine dining experiences mixed in with more frequent meals at less expensive, ethnic or fast casual-type places.

The wine/beer budget, on the other hand, is the predictable result of all the wine and craft beer tasting we've done since ER'ing and spending six months of each year traveling. It is frighteningly easy to get used to a better quality of both.

 

[Music Lover]

I spend about $300 a month for groceries/eating out/liquor...and I eat well.

I can't justify ever spending $1000 to $3000 in a month on food/liquor, the value just isn't there for anyone who has basic cooking skills.

 

[wyecrabber1]

Just the two of us. DW retired last year, I'm still working. We are at the high end for food, drink and dining out. For retirement our budget allows $1500.00 a month, I'm a challenge and she needs her wine to take the edge off. There's a lot of cushion in our food allowance. A typical week has us eating out 3/4 times a week. Once I retire, I'll be the cook and we'll be eating in more often.

 

[ElizabethT]

I spend about $300 a month for groceries/eating out/liquor...and I eat well.

I can't justify ever spending $1000 to $3000 in a month on food/liquor, the value just isn't there for anyone who has basic cooking skills.

Am curious what methods you use for cooking your liquor at home.

 

[Music Lover]

Am curious what methods you use for cooking your liquor at home.

Actually, I used to make my own beer but don't anymore. One of my friends makes pretty good beer and wine, so every now and then I will have some of his. Overall, though, I spend less than $100 a month on liquor and eat most of my meals at home.

 

[gerntz]

After reading this thread, I'm going to open a bottle of wine even though it's just 10a.

 

[marko]

No useful input here but an anecdote:
When we were growing up, Mom barely knew how to turn on the stove. We ate out about 5 nights a week and "eating in" consisted of ordering take-out.

Mom (now 86) still doesn't cook and eats out breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day. It's become her entertainment.

OTOH, I've learned to cook really well and DW and I enjoy some really great meals at home. Our eating out expenses remain high as we consider ourselves foodies and I'm always looking for the next good meal to make at home.

 

[athena53]

We spend about $500/month on groceries and $150/month on alcohol. We've spent less than $120 in restaurants YTD. That figure excludes meals eaten while traveling, which I book as Travel, so it's mainly quick stops here and there (Subway, for example) when it's not convenient to go home for a meal.


We love our home and have always preferred a leisurely meal made at home to getting dressed up and going to a restaurant.