Food Spending in December

Well, was that a year or what?

And I'm just talking about groceries.

Way back in the old, pre-pandemic days, I set a goal of our spending $180.00 a month in 2020 on groceries, including household items such as detergent and toilet paper.

That seemed reasonable. More than reasonable. That was a little higher than the $175.00/month we'd been overshooting, and not that far off of what we averaged in 2019.

Easy peasy. 

Well, okay, we overshot that amount the second month in, but I was pretty sure we could rein our spending in and go through the year hovering around $180.00.

Excuse me while I roll on the floor laughing.

I just finished tallying our December grocery purchases. Food? $278.39. Household? $7.99. Grand total? $286.38.

I can explain some of the December spike. Meijer (a Midwest grocery chain) had a great pre-holiday sale on smoked, spiral-sliced hams. We bought two, making one for Christmas and freezing one for later. That was about $20.00 right there. Towards the end of the month, Kroger had fresh salmon on sale. That was another $40.00. (Yes, we have a lot of meat right now in our freezer!) I bake a lot of almond biscotti in December, and this year baked other cookies as well for the musicians performing in the remote  holiday concert. Baking supplies on one outing ran over $26.00. And that doesn't count the almost $14.00 spent (again at Kroger) after the holidays when we discovered that Kroger had discounted much of the extra supplies it brought it for holiday baking: coconut, semi-sweet chocolate chips, semi-sweet Baker's chocolate. 

So, yeah, it added up. And, to be fair, we have a lot of items that will carry us through January.  (Heck, on the meat front, since we only eat meat a few times a week, we can probably go until June or later.)

Monthly average for 2020 when all was said and done? $237.12, or about $58.00 a month over what I had originally thought was reasonable. But that original figure did not take into account the pandemic. Food costs did rise around here. Meat rose, at times sharply. I'm glad we don't eat a lot of it. At different times of the year, eggs, milk, and some produce all rose. So maybe our final result was par for the course compared with other friends.

I will note there was one (one!) eating out expense in December, 2020. I had infusion later in the day than normal in December. My infusion day, not counting travel, runs about five and a half hours from the moment I check in; travel adds another hour plus to the day. So coming home late in the afternoon, tired, worn out, and hungry. (I don't eat at infusion; since the Covid restrictions went into effect, it is more challenging for me to deal with eating and drinking.) There is a KFC right at the highway interchange just as we turn onto the last stretch of highway to Delaware. I'd already told Warren: turn in there. It was a superb way to spend $11.35.

I'm still mulling over what approach to take in 2021. Set a new goal? Just go with the flow? Something else?  I think it is very important coming into this year to watch the grocery figure as I will explain in a post I hope to have by next week. 

But this is enough for now. The 2020 spending on food is in the books. Let's see what 2021 brings.