And at the End of One

As I have done for several years, and as many other blogger friends do, I track our grocery spending annually. "Grocery" means food bought for home preparation and consumption, and common household items such as toilet paper and laundry detergent. I do not track our eating out expenses. With very rare exception, we don't eat out, and "eating out" includes getting takeout meals or an ice cream cone. Those costs almost never exceed $50.00 a month, even when we head to Mayo, and in any year, we might eat out (except for the occasional ice cream cone) maybe, oh, four of the twelve months. 

So, looking at First Quarter 2025 grocery spending, the results are...

Eye opening. 

At the end of three months, our grocery expenditures were (drum roll, please) $436.10, or an average of $145.37 per  month. Of that amount, a whopping $13.65 was household: parchment paper and toilet paper. That is 3% of the overall spending.

3%. 

The rest was for food: perishables, some stock-up shopping. Okay, there was what I will call a "splurge" from our trip to Mayo in late February. Between the Kwik Trip cinnamon rolls, which have gone up in cost (what hasn't?) and hitting the Rochester Trader Joe's (the only Trader Joe's we shop at, period), we bought and brought home $31.94 of groceries on that trip. 

Okay, okay, we can live with that kind of splurge. As I go through the notes I make (yes, I keep a spreadsheet and make notes as to what the purchases are), I see I wrote "This is NOT about deprivation." We eat well. Probably the biggest change in our diets over recent months, as a result of aging (both of us) and as a result of my major hospitalization and the physical/medical fallout from it in 2023-2024, is that we simply do not eat as much as we used to. So food just lasts longer. 

How much less do we eat? Here is a recent rare meal out (it was a special Warren/April anniversary): we bought two lunch plates (and a tamale) at a local Mexican restaurant. We brought home what we did not eat and ate the leftovers later. From the whole event, in addition to the lunch at the restaurant, we got two more lunches and two more suppers at home. So that was five meals for two adults or ten meals total. To stretch it, we also had a small salad each on one supper, tortilla chips with the lunch, and a side of rice with the last supper (and there is still rice left to make another meal from). Small additions to the overall initial lunches, trust me. 

We are concentrating on "eating down" the food in our upright freezer (100 cubic feet) and that too keeps costs down. There are still frozen vegetables from 2024 (zucchini, sweet corn, pesto) that we hope to finish before the 2025 season starts. We have one turkey (Justice Bus!) and one ham still frozen. With Easter coming up, we hope ham prices drop enough that we can buy a few for the freezer. And I am wishful (but prepared to not have this one granted) that egg prices will drop even a little bit for Easter as well. 

Who knows? Who knows anything about grocery prices in these turbulent times?

First quarter is in the books; let's see what the next three months bring!