What is your grocery budget?

[trcy]

Obviously I know this will vary a lot on location and what you buy. Right now we don't have one and are spending way too much on groceries. I actually don't know how much, but when I look at the account, the majority if our money is going towards groceries. I would like to set a budget and see if we can stay within it, but I don't know what is realistic. We are in a mcol area.

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[PZMommy]

We budget $500 a month for a family of 4. Plus an additional $100 for eating out/take out. We live in a HCOL area. We can’t afford to buy organic or other fancy stuff. Most grocery shopping is done at Walmart or Target. Both DH and I are teachers and facing a strike in the next month or so, which is making our budget even tighter. ☹️

[SnuggleBuggles]

What are you counting in your grocery budget? Like cleaning supplies and paper goods too? I don't sort things out at all. I don't have a budget and we probably spend $200-300/ week on groceries + odds and ends of take out (sub between sports practice...). But, the totals probably include some of those household items as well.
eta- true to expectations, our grocery bill shot up significantly when ds1 was about 15 years old and it is still climbing. He hit that hunger phase late thankfully...our food budget used to be a lot smaller.

[hillview]

we budget and spend $1300 a month. If you had asked me before I would have said $600-$800 but once I started tracking it, it's $1300. That is for all groceries including BJs/Costco (includes toilet paper, trash bags, cleaning supplies and whatnot), delivered milk, dog food. It does not include a meal or 2 out a week. I budget that separately. Believe it or not this is DOWN from what it used to be. I moved to Trader Joe's as my main grocery store (after Whole Foods and then Wegman's). We buy organic product and meat. We bulk buy organic meat in another state and have a deep freeze. This budget includes that spend as well. Suggest you try tracking your spend on Mint or YNAB so you know what you spend.

We feed 4 of us 3 meals a day except for 1-2 dinners a week. Our dinner menu this week is chicken and potatoes, tacos, pasta with meat sauce, eggplant parm. DH will eat leftovers every day for lunch. Kid eat PB&J for lunch etc. I usually eat lunch at work in a meeting (free).

We live in a HCOL area.

[marymoo86]

$1000-1200 for 4 in a MCOL. I don't buy anything with enriched ingredients and stick to dirty dozen for organics and buy grassfed/pastured/wild meat and seafood.

[123LuckyMom]

Well I’m guesstimating based on the fact that I shop usually once a week, but sometimes it’s more and often less, and I very rarely spend more than $150-180 in a big trip (groceries include paper products, laundry detergent, etc.), so my guess is $800/mo. It may be less, but I figure if I overestimate, it’s probably more accurate. Our takeout/restaurant spending is substantial, though. It’s probably close to our food shopping budget, and some weeks, it’s more. In a single weekend, we could easily spend $200 or more on food. That doesn’t take into account occasional weekday lunches out, random weekday coffee shop breakfasts, and additional nights we order in or go out. We haven’t added it up, but I’m positive it’s a pretty appalling amount of money, and if we had to tighten our belts, I’m guessing that’s a place we could save a huge amount of money.


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[Snow mom]

My grocery budget just includes human food and drink (not paper products, cleaning, toiletries, pet food, etc--I break that all out) and is $450/month for a family of 4 in a MCOL area. Eating out I budget $75/mo (that's one or two meals most) and $20/mo for alcohol. We buy organic milk but everything else non-organic and I very much shop sales. Our weekly menu is mostly determined by what looks good and is reasonably priced when I go to the store, not preplanned and then shopped for. It drives DH nuts but I buy a lot of yellow tagged meat (within a few days of the sale buy date) and day old bread. It keeps the spending down for sure!

[jerseygirl07067]

I live in a MCOL and we pay between $150-180 weekly but that includes everything, paper products, toiletries, etc. We are a family of 5, with two teenagers who eat at ton. I shop at Publix for their BOGO deals and a few items I can't get at Aldi, and the rest Aldi. I do some organic, but not a ton since it's pricey. Aldi is getting a lot more organic selections that are very affordable. The key to shopping there is go earier in the day, so you have the best pick of the produce. Once in a while we might hit $200 per week but not common.

[sadbunny]

In mint, you can setup monthly budgets (goals) and the cool thing is you can also see the US average compared to your own spending. FYI I think you can only see it when you're at a desktop (vs phone app), just go to your budget and edit details and it shows you a bar graph of your own monthly spending in that category vs US average. For groceries, it looks like my family of 4 (with a 9yo and 8yo) is $1100/month and the US average is around $342/month! I'm not sure of how they get the average - the average may come from childless households etc. But my "groceries" include all household supplies and pet food. It's just way easier to put my Costco and Target trips categorized as groceries.

[JdrKuhnert]

We spend about 130 a week for groceries for a family of six. That covers breakfast, snack, and dinners for six and my lunches. The boys and my husband buy lunch. We keep costs down by shopping the outer edges of the grocery store. I build our menu around the veggies and meat that are on sale. If a sale is really good, I buy extra and freeze the extra.