This is my first real time post since moving my blog to this site! It's a little scarier to write now that I know other people may be reading and weighing in on what I say. I think that's way better for my accountability than me silently justifying things to myself. But also harder, because obviously, not everyone is going to agree with my assessments. Most everyone has been very friendly and helpful though and are giving me a lot of new things to think about, so thank you!

One of the things I have gotten the most comments on is our grocery budget. Not too shocking considering it's ridiculous right now. I've decided the first step is to separate out the things that are not really groceries from it (things like toothpaste and wet wipes, etc), so I have a better idea of what the real numbers I'm working with are. Then we can address why our misc budget is suddenly so high later!

I also found a few interesting studies about this topic on line. This one by Planet Money

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/08/154568945/what-ame... describes the average percent of income families spend on groceries, both over all and by cetegory (meats, grains, fruit & veg, etc). This Gallup Poll http://www.gallup.com/poll/156416/Americans-Spend-151-Week-F... describes the average amounts spent by region of the country and well as age group and other things like that. And this one http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/FoodPlans/2012/CostofF... by the USDA gives the cost of groceries for a family of 2 and 4 depending on whether you are going by a liberal, moderate, low-cost or thrifty budget plan. I figured my next step could be seeing how I compare to all those things.

So first off, my numbers for Dec will not be completely accurate due to some resistance my husband has been having about using the appropriate account for making purchases. He does not like the inconvenience to have to divide one shopping trip up into two payments so as to make it easier to separate our discretionary spending from our non-discretionary spending. He's also not great about giving me receipts though. After going back and forth about this a few times, I think I have finally convinced him that he is only making his life easier at the expense of making my life harder, since I am the one trying to keep track of all these things for us. Anyways, I think it will be better going forward. And for the big grocery trips I do have all the data from this month. But the accounting for the little side trips made during the week make not be accurate for this first half of the month.

So, as best I can tell, we have spent about $715 on groceries so far this month. We use our grocery delivery service once per week (though this month there are 5 Friday's instead of 4) and we use our discount warehouse store every other week, and this month there are two trips. I estimate then that we are about 57% done grocery shopping this month and therefore if spending stays the same, we will pay about $1025 on groceries this month. So, it looks like about 80% of our groceries+ budget really was for groceries, and the other 20% should probably be lumped in with misc expenses.

Now, how does that compare to the studies I mentioned? First off, percent of income. I am pretty sure this is based on gross rather than net pay. I don't really track our gross pay as carefully as our net pay, but I would sat it is roughly $8450/month. So, that means we are spending about 12% of our monthly gross income on food. It looks like the average american family is spending closer to 8.5% these days though, so this is high, unless I want to go back to 1982 when Americans were apparently spending more (which I do not). I'm actually a little surprised its not higher than that for us, considering how it feels each month. I guess that's probably because based on our net pay, its more like 16.5%.

Gallup says that, to no one's surprise, people making over $75K+ tend to spend more on groceries than people making less than that, and considerably more than people making below $30K. This suggests that it is normal we would be on the higher side of average, especially given what we may have been used to before we started all the debt reduction stuff. However, they also say that groceries cost a little less here in the midwest than other places, so maybe that's all cancelled out. Additionally my age group (30 somethings) tends to have higher grocery bills as well. These polls do not directly consider family size, however, which nationally is 3.14 (pi!) right now and we have more like 4.33 with my daughter at college). That would definitely make it higher as well. Regardless of what people tend to do in my situations though, that doesn't mean we might not need to do something different if we want to get out of debt faster.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the USDA says that a family of our size and age typically needs between $548 and $1067 to adequately provide for the nutritional needs of their family per month. Ahem. Apparently we're on the liberal plan, though at least we're not exceeding even that!

Well, it is clear after looking at all this data that there are changes that could be made. I don't ever see myself going on the thrifty plan. Food is just too important to me and I'm sure I will blog about that more later. And being only 2 1/2 months into this debt reduction thing, the low cost plan seems pretty far out to me as well. But I would like to make it a goal to start aiming to be within the moderate cost plan. That seems reasonable and frankly, necessary, if we want to make headway here.

I think I may visit a couple grocery stores soon with my weekly grocery delivery list and compare what I would have spent going there instead. I need to find out whether it is this service itself which is most increasing our costs or rather the types of items we are buying. And then we'll have to figure out what to do about that.