So I’m just one dude and 10k a year just on food seems incredibly high. I don’t go out that often, ~$1600 was at restaurants. I’m not really sure what I’m doing wrong while shopping at grocery stores and want to track grocery purchases better. The store I typically go to doesn’t have online receipts to use.
I’m wondering what kind of apps are available for tracking grocery expenditures that Lemmings would recommend? It would be nice to be able to go back and check prices/sizes of things too, so what is being shrinkflated/skimpflated
I’m not sure about tracking your spending, but I can tell you that you’re grocery shopping is way too wasteful. That’s like $200/week on groceries for one person. Unless you have a very limited diet, you’re paying more than double what you should be at the grocery store. For context, when I get groceries for me and my wife, I rarely spend over $50. Get store brands, buy bigger sizes, and shop at cheaper stores like Aldi. Stop buying frozen and processed garbage; buy fresh meat and vegetables and cook big batches and have leftovers. This time of year is great for a big pot of soup/chili!
I think if I were interested in tracking spending like that, I might just build a simple spreadsheet with dates and costs, maybe add variables for the unusual things like stocking up to have guests to feed or whatever. Sorry I can’t be more helpful on that front. If you’re not experienced with cooking, there are some really good YouTube channels that can teach you some good, versatile recipes that are very budget-friendly.
It really depends on where you live. $200 doesn’t get you that far in places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Especially if you’re cooking for every meal for more than one person for a week.
You’re not wrong. But for context, my wife and I live in Ashburn, VA (NoVA is super expensive but not quite Manhattan or San Francisco expensive). A lot of it comes down to choices though. Of course eggs and bacon for breakfast are not gonna be in the budget I mentioned, but oatmeal with some frozen berries fits just fine. No you can’t get steak to fit in that budget all the time, but if you have a vegetarian meal every once in a while then you get some flexibility in your budget to allow steak sometimes because meat is way more expensive than a can of black beans.
I also make my lunches and pack them for when I’m at work, so that’s a lot of the food I eat and it’s way cheaper than it would be if I ordered something somewhere, and it doesn’t take much time to make a whole batch of sandwiches for the week. Idk I grew up poor, so these things are just in my nature, and now even though I don’t have to be so frugal I still choose to because it just doesn’t make sense not to.
I don’t think it’s as simple as coming down to choice. Planning, shopping, cooking, and cleaning takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort that not every person can afford even if they can afford ingredients. It’s not uncommon for people in the city to come home exhausted after 70 hours work week and hour long commutes.
Sometimes it’s not physically or mentally possible to sustain the kind of min-maxing lifestyle of cooking under a tight budget. Cooking is hard, cooking affordably is even harder. Sometimes, having a steak for dinner is one of the few things that keeps people happy enough to not kill themselves in an exploitative work culture while being crushed by unaffordable housing.
I don’t think OP is necessary overspending because it really depends on where they live, how many hours they work, what their living situation is like, how much of their own mental load they carry.
I’ve lived on a tight budget before. For a time I made do with $30 a week in an expensive town, albeit almost a decade ago. I skimmed on everything I could and bought as many $1 bags of spoiled vegetables as I could, trimmed off all the moldy parts, and just made whatever vegetable soup I could every week. This is one of like 50 other things I had to do to get by. And it wasn’t great for my mental health. It sucked to have to spend so much time and energy when I had so few hours left in a day to do all this.
Living cheap has a cost too. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that OP is necessary choosing to waste money when we don’t know where they live or what else is going on in their life.
I understand that there are many variables that we’re not privy to, but that doesn’t change that fact that quick, cheap, simple, nutritious meals are possible, and OP has internet access to find all the info necessary to make it happen. I work 12 hour, highly active shifts, so I’m no stranger to being tired, but it’s pretty easy to throw a decent meal together in 15-20 minutes.
OP has said nothing about working long hours or being tired or anything like that. I’m not sure it’s wise to assume anything specific about details of their lifestyle too much. I know I was speculating with regards to spending, but they said that they don’t eat out much and they still spent a pretty absurd amount just to feed themself, so I gave the possible out of having a restrictive diet. Halal/kosher costs more, gluten-free costs more, most seafood is pricey if they’re pescatarian, etc. If that’s not a factor, then there’s zero legitimate reason to spend $200/week feeding one person aside from ignorance, so I was just trying to introduce them to some thrifty tips and basic shopping/cooking educational resources. An approachable favorite of mine is the Pro Home Cooks YouTube channel because he has some videos where he’s doing the prep and cooking in real time while talking to show how fast and easy it is, targeting 15 minute dinners for 2-4 people.
I’m not trying to be a dick so I’m sorry if I’ve come off that way. I’m sincerely sharing habits and strategies that I’ve found to be helpful. <3
I’m not sure how I became the one making assumptions about OP’s lifestyle. I was asking you not to make assumptions because you said that spending $200 on groceries was a choice to overspend, and now you’re saying it’s due to ignorance. Even if it can be improved upon, I don’t think either is necessary true and really depends on OP’s living situation.
It’s apparent to me now that you’re just looking to have an argument, so I’m going to disengage. They are explicitly reaching out because they themself believe that they are overspending on groceries, hence their post. Have a good day.
I was only asking you to be mindful about high cost of living in some cities and how high spending habits aren’t always a product of moral failure. Not sure how that is constituted as looking to have an argument, but you do you.
$200 a week is easily enough for a family of 4. I have no idea how you even get to this level.
I hate to say it, but one way to do it is using a spreadsheet. Every time you shop, you create two new columns – the item and it’s individual price, and at the bottom the total.
At the end of the year, you can add up and graph the totals.
Add a column to track how much of it you’ve thrown out as well.
I would focus on it the from a different angle. Instead of tracking grocery spending, I would set a number that you aim to not go over for a given month. Based upon the numbers you provided you spend an average of $700 per month on groceries. If you, for example, aimed to start with reducing your by 50% to $350 per month you would save $4400 yearly. That’s a sizable sum of money that you could put towards a vacation or a buttload of smaller purchases.
As far as how you could go about saving that much, I would advise setting a limit on both how many grocery trips you make and how much you allow yourself to spend on each trip. So lets say you decide on about 4 trips a month (roughly weekly). In that case, spending $80 per trip would safely stay within the budget of $350. There would even be ~$30 leftover for a couple of mini trips for one or a couple items.
To help stay in the budget, it might be helpful to take a small notepad along and log how much each item costs at as soon as you put it in your cart. You can stretch your dollar further by buying the products that tend to be more out of sight and less convenient. The products that are highly visible like the endcaps of aisles and that are at eye level tend to be the more expensive options since they are usually rented by the brands to get the prime attention real estate. Stores with a less than traditional layout, like Aldi, are also a great way to save since they are usually cheaper and let you get more bang for your buck.
Another useful practice might be a simple grocery list. After you write it out but before you go in the store, you could order the items based on how important they are to have. Something like sweets < Potato chips < crackers < fruit < veggies < presliced meat < spreads / oils < bread. If it seems like your running total for the trip won’t cover all that’s on your list then you could forgo some of the less important or more expensive items. When calculating the running total keep in mind that there’s usually a ~10% tax on that will be added to the total. So $70 worth of groceries would end being ~$77 after checkout.
As far as apps, I’ve tried some of them and I found they were too tedious for my taste. Even receipts often obscure what the actually product is your getting with a product shorthand that is illegible. That’s why I have ended up breaking out a smallish notepad for tracking purchases instead of using receipts.
I guess this comment got a little long winded for lemmy, but oh well.
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Always have a folded up piece in your pocket and a pen. As you complete your transaction write “grocery $37” on it. Later enter into a spreadsheet (do the same with a phone by using a note taking app, Google sheets, or whatever)
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have a set of folders, one for each month, in a file drawer or a hanging file box. This month’s file is first. When you get home dump your receipts in it (and bills, etc). At the end of the month pull out the file and track what you want to track and shred any unneeded paper. You can leave useful reminders in there so they turn up next year and remind you to renew things, etc. Place the folder in back. Now this month’s folder is in front.
And so on.
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I’d like something that will take a photo of a supermarket receipt and record every item. I want to be able to, for example, check the price history of my favourite breakfast cereal or a bottle of milk. I’ve got a shoebox of receipts dating back a few years and I’d love to be able to do some kind of price comparison on them but with minimal effort coz I’m lazy.
Yeah, this would be great.
Get one credit card you only use at the grocery. If you get one with cash back or points you will get money back.
Where do you live? Share a typical grocery list and what you paid for certain items. Do you eat meat? Pre-made meals? How often do you cook?
I just got Monarch and it works amazing for tracking everything. Used to use Mint, but they decided to merge to CreditKarma and screw themselves.
PaperlessNGX can take pictures of receipts and usually OCR them into a useable list that you can manipulate in a spreadsheet.
Oo that looks workable. Great suggestion! Did find that I can get email reciepts if I do reward program and remember to scan it at checkout. Between those things I can probably build something. Maybe it’ll fill this niche that looks like a number of people would find helpful
I used a toss away email address and signed up for this budget…
https://thefrugalgene.com/freebies/
Basically you copy their master sheet and you get a Google doc… you enter your expenses and it tracks it month to month and annually. It’s pretty snazzy.
My wife and I did this for several years. It’s really nice to see where your money is going
Maybe I should branch out with my food choices. It has always been some kind of prepared meat over rice.
Do you have a speadsheet of some sort? If you’re familiar with spreadsheets - that’s a pretty good way.
Sorry I don’t have any app suggestions, but for comparison that seems at least as much or even higher than what my wife and I spend together on our groceries. It might be worth looking at the types of things you’re buying, like there’s a lot of generics that are made in the same place as the name-brand products and sell for half the price. Also do you end up throwing out a lot of food? Your age matters a lot too, because if you’re in your teens or early 20’s you probably have a voracious appetite which goes away as you get older.
There is KitchenOwl and Grocy off of Fdroid if you want.
My how our education system has utterly failed the last two or three generations. Personal finances used to be taught in High School economics, including how to track spending. With the tap, swipe and scan payments we have these days, few people even keep a record of their spending other than perhaps the account balance. I use a checkbook program and spreadsheet together to keep track of where my money goes, and reconcile it with my bank statement every month to be sure everything adds up. This does mean I have to get paper receipts when I can’t get a digital one, but living your life means you can’t just float around through life expecting the apps and electronics to keep you on track, you have to do some work.
Part of this request seems to be to track prices and quantities for individual items purchased at the grocery store. I doubt you’re keeping up with that in your checkbook, but an app might be able to.
Still, I do agree that we’re failing kids by not teaching them personal finance skills.
