Second Quarter Pennies Review

 

Back in April, I wrote about our household expenses, especially groceries, and made some projections for where prices were going. In retrospect, even though I was aware of rising food prices, I did not take into account just how much food prices were rising. Tallying our grocery purchases for the second quarter of 2022 drove that point home.

At the end of the first quarter, our monthly grocery expenditures averaged $206.03. That is both food and common household items such as toilet paper, dish soap, and so on. 

I recently totaled our expenditures for the second quarter of 2022. Our household purchases have remained low, less than $20 a month. But our food? Oh yeah, it has gone up. In two of those three months, food purchases came in just under $300.00. I can make some excuses, such as "Well, we did have a guest artist stay with us in May and then one in June, and so I bought extra," but that doesn't entirely explain the figure. It's not like I was buying lobster and champagne. (Frozen lobster tails right now are running about $43.50 a pound locally.) And there was the half gallon of skim milk that I had to buy in downtown Rochester because I forgot to buy it at Kwik Trip before going to our hotel. That lapse, sending me to an in-walking-distance small store near the Mayo Clinic, cost me $3.89. But again, those little lapses do not explain the overall rise in our groceries.

But other things do. I have been tracking a few items, one we buy frequently. A gallon of milk? $2.99 all spring, then jumped to $3.49 or thereabouts in the first week of May. Flour (5 pound bag, unbleached, all purpose white) took a 50¢ raise from April to June. (White wheat flour took an even greater leap.) Bread has gone up across all the stores by 25¢ or more. Sometimes the leaps are huge, sometimes they are small, but so far of the items I am tracking, very few have held steady. So start adding pennies, dimes, quarters, and more to your shopping list items, and the rise is there. 

So what did we spend in the second quarter of 2022? In food alone, we spent an average of $266.00 a month. ($265.99, to be exact.) With the household items added in, our monthly average groceries came to $277.75 for the second quarter, which raised our year-to-date average to $241.89.  

Yeah. $241.89.

It is not just us, of course. In a long conversation with a good friend past weekend, he commented that he budgeted $50 a month for household items such as laundry detergent, toilet paper, and the like. "And that is no longer enough!" he exclaimed. That friend is a household of one; I didn't comment on our average expenditures for such items ($11.65/month through the first half of 2022) in our household of two.

Looking ahead into the third quarter, there are some bright spots. We are halfway through July and have spent less than $60.00 on groceries. Our food waste is almost zero in this house, so we're making the most of what we have. And all those hams we bought back in April? We have been carving them up and enjoying ham sandwiches and other ham meals steadily. Our June guest enjoyed the sliced ham, as did my dad (who I sent home with ham slices both to eat and to freeze for later). Only one ham remains intact out of the six; it may make an appearance as a whole ham much later this year. And the garden is coming on; I have yet to see zucchini, but my hopes remain high. 

I am grateful that our household continues to run smoothly on the money front. From my volunteer work with our Legal Clinic, and in talking with friends and colleagues active in the food world (food banks, summer lunches, and such), I know that there are many who do not have that luxury in these times.