My approach to spending less than $200 a month on food
Before I got into frugality I spent no less than $400 a month on groceries for just myself. If you include restaurants, coffee, and alcohol, I spent easily double that, with expensive months going over $1,000. I dont have good granular data on my pre-frugality spending habits, so this is a bit of a guess.
Now, my average cost for everything I put in my face (food or drink from any source, including alcohol and coffee. If I smoked or did drugs, Id include it in this number) is less than $200. Im working on getting below $100/mo at the moment, but Im not yet in the Two Figure Food Club.
There are many ways to reduce food costs. This post describes the way I did it. My method involved a spreadsheet. (Surprised?) You dont have to build a multi-tabbed spreadsheet with VLOOKUP functions all over the place to eat for less, Im quite sure, but I did. Even if you arent a spreadsheet junkie, I think youll find useful information in this post that you can apply to your own approach.
This is what I did, in approximate order of impact on my food cost:
- I chose to become a person who doesnt go out to restaurants, bars, and cafes very often, and instead prepares his own meals.
- I did a calc and came up with a 400 calories per dollar metric. I use this as a quick rule of thumb for in-store purchasing decisions.
- I built a spreadsheet with the per-serving cost of foods I buy and made several meal plans to get a sense for what eating under $200 looks like.
- Then I tracked every single thing I ate over two weeks, entered it in the spreadsheet, and observed my actual daily food cost.
- I found sources of cheaper groceries.
- I bought in bulk. Duh.
- I became a person who likes to make things from scratch myself.
Identity, Strategy, and Tactics
Youll notice that finding sources of cheaper groceries is one of the last things I did. You might think that should be the first thing to do. Nope.
Finding cheaper ingredients is a tactic. When trying to effect change, its way more effective to start with identity and strategy. I want to be doing the right things, even if I dont always do them perfectly. If Im doing the wrong thing, it doesnt matter how well Im doing it.
Avoiding restaurants and crafting a deep understanding of the calorie/dollar cost of various food types are strategic moves. Even if I screw up and buy the more expensive 25lb sack of brown rice because Im too lazy to check another source, Im not going to be spending much money on food.
Clipping coupons for bulk orders of caviar, on the other hand, isnt going to get me below $200/mo no matter how dialed my bargain-hunting tactical proficiency is.
Alright, weve got a lot of ground to cover, lets dive in.
First, I stopped buying food from restaurants, including alcohol (bars) and coffee (cafes). This one is pretty obvious, since a meal at a restaurant is so much more expensive than preparing your own food. I was only eating out a few times a week, and I knew how to cook well enough at home that this didnt require a huge amount of practical skill learning.
Since I knew how to cook more or less, there was nothing complicated about not going to restaurants. I just… stopped walking into restaurants. The difficult part was changing my identity, the story I consciously and unconsciously told myself about myself. I knew myself to be a person who would casually walk into the kind of restaurant I liked, the sort that reflected my personality and values, and plop down $20-$100 on food and drink for myself and my partner and a friend or two if they were with us.
I liked this story about myself. It said things about how cosmopolitan I was, what my tastes were like in choosing solid but not pretentious establishments, and communicated signals about my generosity and approximate level of wealth. It felt good to go out, and that feeling had only a little to do with fulfilling physical hunger.
Ending that story was difficult. Well, no. It would have been difficult, I imagine, if I hadnt made my decision to stop going out a month before the lockdowns of 2020. As it turned out, the first few months of this identity change were quite easy due to the inaccessibility of restaurant food. So I lucked out and ran this step on easy mode. By the time access to restaurants opened up again, I was habituated to preparing all my own meals.
Briefly, though, the primary strategies for going off restaurant food is to learn a handful of meals to make that are tasty and easy. I think a lot of people either go for the whole Gordon Ramsay thing and think cooking at home involves lots of googling recipes and buying exotic ingredients. Your dinner on Tuesday doesnt have to be Instagram worthy or take three hours. It can be easy. Most of my baseline meals take about ten minutes of prep time.
Also, sometimes people who go for home cooking immediately go for eating really healthy, or what they think is healthy, and they wind up with bland or boring food. This is a great way to get demotivated to cook for yourself. While youre still establishing the habit of cooking at home instead of going out to restaurants, go for tasty and dont overly worry about being super healthy. Positively reinforce cooking at home first if thats a struggle. You can dial in healthy once home cooking is a habit. Whatever you make at home is almost sure to be healthier than what you can get at restaurants anyways.
One way to approach this first step is by doing a Month Long Experiment or Challenge. Instead of thinking that youre never going to step foot inside your favorite restaurant, bar, or cafe ever again, just commit to going a month of only home-prepped food and drink. You can do, or not do, just about anything for a month. And youll have reset your habits and learned new skills by the end of it.
Quitting the eating out habit made a huge difference and I didnt have to do even a little bit of math.
The next steps involved some number crunching. I even built a spreadsheet.
If you dont like number crunching, heres a short pep talk: Some people think intuition and number crunching are opposed to each other. This is wrong. The point of crunching numbers is to cultivate an accurate intuition. The term for an intuition that isnt informed by real numbers is “a wild ass guess”. Per Josh Waitzkin in The Art of Learning, you run the numbers to forget the numbers.
I no longer look at my food spreadsheet at all, because I spent a solid month using it every day as I was learning what food actually costs, rather than just wildly guessing or scribbling confusing notes on the back of envelopes. I now have a solid intuition for what kinds of ingredients to buy, at what price points, that will result in a sub$200 grocery bill. I put out a brief burst of focused attention a couple years ago, and now I rarely have to think about it consciously. I did the numbers and then I forgot the numbers.
I first calculated how many calories per dollar I needed to average in order to get below $200.
- $200 per month is $6.67 per day.
- At the time I ate around 2,700 calories a day.
- 2,700 calories / $6.67 = 400 calories per dollar.
- (If you eat 2,000 calories, the number is 300 calories per dollar.)
With this 400cal/$ number in my head, I could walk into a grocery store and quickly get a sense for what kind of food would be a good fit. Pick up a jar, and multiply the calories per serving by the number of servings in the jar. Then divide by the cost. (Im bad at mental math so I use my phone calculator app).
If a jar of peanut butter comes in at 200cal/dollar, I put it back on the shelf. If a fancy mayonnaise I really like is on crazy sale and its at 850cal/dollar, I put the hand basket back, get a cart, and buy them out.
Now, yes, there is more to food than just calories. Veggies arent about calories, theyre about nutrients n stuff. And even if youre getting enough calories and nutrients, life is going to be dim and dark if your food is bland and boring. I think of food in three categories:
- Baseload calories like coconut and olive oil, brown rice, legumes, sweet potatoes, steel cut oats, nuts and seeds, etc.
- Nutrients n stuff like kale, onions, peppers, carrots, organ meat, fermented stuff like kimchi and saurkraut, etc.
- Stuff to make my food tasty if it isnt already – salt, pepper, hot sauce, salsa, oregeno, paprika, chili powder, and the like.
The calorie/$ number is useful because I know that if I want to get close to $200/mo, most of my baseload calorie foods need to be well above my 400 calories per dollar number, because veggies and the like are going to be under it. Happily, there are many such foods. I buy coconut oil above 1,000 calories per dollar. Steel cut oats, lentils, wheat berries, and rice are all foods that can be got for around 1,000 calories per dollar.
SPENDING $200 A MONTH ON GROCERIES
FAQ
Can you survive on 200 a month in groceries?
What is a good amount to spend on groceries per month?
What is the average monthly cost of groceries for 1 person?
How much should you spend on groceries a month?
If you’re looking to save on feeding your family, here is a $200 a month grocery list to get you started, as well as other healthy tips on trimming your shopping expenses. This sample budget uses the assumption of store brands and Aldi, sale or discount store shopping whenever possible.
How much should a family of 4 pay for groceries?
For a moderate budget for a family of four, you would spend $302.80 a week for groceries or $1,311.50 a month. Liberal budget. For a liberal budget for a family of four, you can plan on paying $365.20 a week or $1,582.90 a month. There are other factors to consider when deciding how much to budget for groceries. Teenagers really do eat a lot.
How much does a grocery plan cost?
The most recent estimate for a family of four, defined as a male and female between ages 20 and 50 and two children, ages 6 to 8 and 9 to 11, put the cost of the thrifty plan at $969 per month . These food plans can suggest a monthly grocery budget for your household, but they’re still estimates, and won’t be perfectly tailored to you.
How much should a family of 4 spend a week?
For a low-cost budget for a family of four, you can plan on spending $243.80 a week or about $1,055.80 a month. Moderate-cost plan. For a moderate budget for a family of four, you would spend $302.80 a week for groceries or $1,311.50 a month. Liberal budget.