We ate food all last year. Just the whole time. We were routinely caught eating things. Many of you probably assume we ate burrito bowls for every meal. That’s not true, sometimes we ate oatmeal.
I wanted to clear the air just in case any of you were like, “Hey, that Burrito guy seems cool, but what’s his grocery situation?” I don’t know if any of you are questioning whether or not I deserve having burrito bowls as my moniker. That’s why we’re all here.
First off, how can we possibly know how much we’ve spent? Great question. We aren’t food price scholars. Instead, we use a free app called Personal Capital. The way it works is you link your credit cards, investment accounts, debts, checking accounts etc., and it gives you a snapshot of your entire financial life. All our grocery spending, restaurants, Amazon Prime purchases etc. are all categorized. Very powerful stuff.
This is not actually an article about you getting Personal Capital, even though you should download it. This is an article about how much we ate in 2018. Since Mrs. Burrito Bowl is on top of things, she’s already categorized all of our 2018 spending into various groups. This makes it theoretically possible to figure out how much money we spent per meal. I don’t really know if that’s how you’re supposed to use the word theoretical. Let’s not dwell on it.
Here’s how I’ll break it down:
There’s two of us who eat food that isn’t breast milk, and if you figure three meals per day for 365 days, that’s a total of 2190 possible meals for 2018.
Next we’ll look at how much our overall grocery bill was for the entire year. These numbers aren’t exact as it’s possible to buy things that aren’t food from grocery stores. Close enough, I always say.
So we spent $7,120 on groceries in 2018.
That equates to 598.63 per month. The per month isn’t really important information other than it’s easier to visualize a monthly breakdown. So let’s take $7,120 divided by 2190 possible meals.
7120/2190= 3.25
We spent $3.25 per meal on groceries. Thanks for reading this article.
But WAIT! That’s just groceries. We’re frugal, but we didn’t eat in every meal. We went out. So $3.25 is artificially low. How much did we spend being social and fancy at restaurants?
Our total restaurant bill for 2018 was $2,757
That comes out to $229.85 per month. Wow. That seems like a lot. Maybe we really are fancy people. Does that feel like a little or a lot to you? Also, how cool is this blog now that we have screen shots? Can you believe how professional these circular graphs look? Me either.
I think we could have eaten out a little bit less, but we got great value when we chose to go out. Frugality is about life optimization, not deprivation. We ate out rarely enough that we really appreciated every time we paid someone else to make us food. It was never monotonous for us, it was always special.
Mrs. Burrito Bowl was pregnant for most of 2018, so I was going to blame our higher restaurant bill on that, but the chart above shows our biggest two months of the year were January and February, before she was pregnant.
So now to get our more accurate total we need to add $2,757 to our $7120 we spent on groceries.
2,757+7120= 9,877. Yikes. That seems like more money. So now to get our real cost per meal we take 9,877 and divide it by 2,190 total meals.
9,877/2,190= $4.51
Okay, so really we spent about $4.51 per person per meal on food.
We also spent, (ok I spent) $331 on alcohol for the year. If you add that into the mix that’s $10,208 total spent on eating and drinking, which equates to $4.66 per person per meal.
In total we spent about $4.66 per person, per meal.
Just for fun we’ll do one more calculation. We spent $10,208 in order to shove things into our faces. What’s that per day?
10,208/365= 27.97
We spent $27.97 total per day on eating and drinking, about 14 bucks per person.
What do those numbers tell us?
First, we spent a lot more than we wanted to, but probably a lot less than most people. For those $4.66 we ate really well. We buy the more expensive eggs, the more expensive grass fed meats, and we hardly ever eat cheap fillers like pasta and bread. We did eat a lot of burrito bowls. Like, a lot of burrito bowls. You can really bring the cost of a meal down with some bulk beans and rice.
Second, a lot of our food budget was taken up eating out, and we don’t eat out very often. Eating at home is so much less expensive than going out to dinner. I don’t think people realize how much getting takeout once per week, or getting a nice dinner in the city once a month, adds up.
We probably get takeout or go out to eat once or twice per month. Despite that, eating out ended up being a whopping 38.7% of our overall food budget! Plus, when you eat at restaurants you’re not getting nearly the quality of ingredients as you do when you eat at home.
Third, to calculate this we put all our groceries into the calculation. Sometimes people try to calculate each individual meal, but then they eat a bunch of snacks throughout the day that they don’t really count. Our price per meal is just an average of what we eat throughout the day, not necessarily our meals.
Fourth, eat your leftovers. We used to be really bad about making food then shoving it to the back of the fridge for several weeks until we were scared to eat it. It would hang out in the back for a couple more weeks until we were afraid to even open up the container to throw it away. Not an ideal situation.
We were much better last year at dating our leftovers and eating them all before they go bad. If you’re throwing food out because you just never get around to eating it, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Pretty fun huh?
How much did you spend eating and drinking in 2018? If you’d like to get a handle on your finances you should download Personal Capital so you can do fun things like figure out your net worth and how much you’re spending on groceries. It’s a free app and is well worth every penny.
If you want to try Personal Capital use this code, link your accounts, and we’ll both get $20! Hooray. Download Personal Capital and get $20 cause you’re real as real gets
This post may contain affiliate links if the above link counts as an affiliate link. I’m not really sure how technology works.
If you enjoyed this article please share it with your friends and enemies
Here’s a few more articles you might enjoy regardless of how you felt about this one:
Mr. Burrito Bowl Goes to Jury Duty
11 Smart Ways to Lower Your Grocery Bill and Eat Healthier
Did you know? Sharing this will make you happy!
