I have been curious about what a typical food budget is for a family of 5. So I did some searching online and found that it varies depending on where you live, what you chose to eat, if you eat out or cook at home.
The USDA allowed food budget per person is $7 a day. Which comes out to about $1050 a month for a family of 5. To me that is a huge amount of money to spend a month.
I sat down and did a realistic food budget for our family, which meant looking at exactly how much we spend in a given month, via our bank acct. records. I found that we spend an average of $720 a month for food, less if you take into account that sometimes we buy personal care products such as tissues, toilet paper etc...
We do not buy any meat, get chicken rarely, but we do spend money on wild salmon and other fish from TJ's. Fruits and veggies come from either TJ's, farmer's market or the neighborhood fruit/veg. store. We also have a small garden that produced some potatoes, tomatoes and yellow beans this year. Not enough for a family of 5 but something is something :).
I try to make every meal by scratch using whole ingredients, but we do use beans and re fried beans from a can. I have made it a habit to reduce the amount of junk food and prepared food that we buy, even though when we do buy them, every thing comes from TJ's which means no food coloring, preservatives or artificial ingredients. We have also had to switch to buying a lot of gluten free products for my dd.
There are many ways to cut down on your food budget, by eating less meat, buying less prepackaged food, cooking from whole ingredients, shopping around, cutting coupons and buying in bulk. My next venture will be to go to Costco and see if we can save money by shopping from there.
I am curious to see what other's food budget looks like, what do you do to save $ and eat healthy at the same time?
