Food, Glorious Food

I have been using Quicken to record my purchases since I got out of college 10 years ago. I am fairly meticulous about recording the category that goes with the purchase, for example Dining, Auto:Fuel, Shannon:Clothes, etc. When you have that much history and information at your disposal, you can find some interesting trends.

I was recently looking at our yearly expenditures for food, groceries and dining combined. Back in 2003, our first full year of marriage, we spent $8853 on food. Last year, we spent a whopping $19,634. Almost $20,000 on food!

Over half of that expenditure comes from dining out. Dining out is a luxury and more expensive than eating in, but it is often easier to do for us, for several reasons. One, Shannon works part-time, and as the primary cook, that situation makes it harder for her to be home to make dinner, both because of diminished time and energy. Another point to consider is that with the added money from the part-time job as children's minister we have more money to choose to dine out if we want.

Also, we do have Jacob now. Besides being another person to feed, he affects the food budget in ways you don't expect. It is easier to eat out with Jacob since cooking for 3, especially one who is a little picky, can be hard. Also, you are out and about more because of various activities with him so stopping and eating out gets done more.

Another reason is the high gas prices. I work from home so we are not heavily affected by gas prices as most, but I still see the hidden cost of rising fuel prices. Food production requires lots of tractors and combines and transport trucks. The added expenses of gasoline gets put into the prices we pay for groceries and dining out.

(As an aside, even though I work at home and Shannon is 3 miles from our church, high gas prices do affect us. Back in 2003, we spent $1263 on auto fuel. In 2007, we spent $3396. $2000 more, but far less significant than the increase in food expenditures. Back in 2003, Shannon worked full-time and Dallas has many more great dining spots than Springfield/North Nashville. I bet we ate out as much then as we do now, but it just costs so much more.)

With this realization of the high amount of food expenditures, I felt we have to find a way to cut back. To do so, we needed to make a solid commitment to eating in instead of dining out. That sounds all well and good, but you also have to commit to planning your meals and grocery shopping. I decided to take the lead in doing that . Grocery shopping is not something Shannon loves to do, mostly because she usually has Jacob with her. Since I have never done it before on any consistent basis, I am a little jazzed about it, like a new challenge. Of course, I still work with Shannon on planning the meals and making the grocery list as she will be the one cooking the food.

We are now 1 month into this and we are seeing substantiation improvements. It is early to state the savings with great confidence, but it looks like making an effort to eat in is saving us $750-$500 per month.

As my sister mentioned, I have turn her on to the wonderful and mysterious world of coupons. I will say more about that later as it truly a strange world, but one that I do see benefits from.

By the way, lunch today is taco soup which we made last night. Yum, yum.