The Problem:
Like most new marriages, we had problems!!!
But one problem we didn’t anticipate … i.e. we spent waaay too much on Food. It was bad. One year we almost spent $30,000, which is the median income in the U.S. ?
It seemed like no-matter what we tried, or how hard we tried, we couldn’t control our food bill
We ignored it for a while, saw the bill, tried to fix it, made progress, tried again, failed again…
Even though I (Josh) am a former CPA, CFO, have managed billion dollar budgets, I couldn’t solve this pesky problem of spending too much on food each month.
To further complicate things, Dana’s a Registered Dietitian, and a Personal Trainer … so it’s not like we’re about to eat cheap junk food. It’s got to be healthy. We only get one body, and after all “we’re worth it” right? But where do you draw the line?
Well, that’s exactly what we had to figure out. Initially we just went all in on the mantra that “health has no price” … well, as it turns out, it does have a price 😉 … and it was more than we were willing to pay. We gave ourselves a lot of excuses … “it’s organic,” “it’s an investment in our bodies,” “food just costs more in this City,” “it’s not worth my time to go to that other grocery store.” And let’s be real, fighting over food cost with your spouse is not an exciting proposition.
But after years of these conversations, we finally had to tackle it for two reasons. 1) Embarrassment (yes, failure can be a great motivator) … you see, I advise people how to live off reasonable budgets all the time, and Dana advises people how to eat healthy (all the time), so we had to figure out how to achieve both of them together or we couldn’t keep advising people. 2) I decided to retire early. So spending 50% of our household budget on food (90% after accounting for housing costs) was just not realistic.
So after 5 years of struggling … and believe me, “the struggle was real,” we finally resolved to figure it out.
According to the USDA, an avg couple spends ~$900 / mo on Food ($625 on Groceries & $275 Eating Out).
https://www.creditdonkey.com/average-grocery-bill-two.html
That’s ~$30 / day, $15 a person, or $5 / meal. Not as easy as it seems if you’re used to buying whatever is around when you’re hungry. One bowl of Bibimbap and you can’t eat the rest of the day. Or even worse, eating at a nice restaurant and ordering a bottle of wine for two, and you’ll easily drop $120 after tip, which is like blowing through 24 meals of $ in one sitting.
After diving into the problem, we realized there’s a lot working against us:
- Organic Foods are ~50% more expensive than Inorganic (which we intuitively knew) but that’s a big difference
- Food Prices are increasing — particularly for healthy food
- Food Manufacturers are constantly finding ways to sell us “Less for More”
- Prices lack Transparency — with different variations in quality, quantity, and serving sizes, it’s difficult to know whether a $4 item is better or worse than the $12 item. We found that often the cheaper items were the worst when you consider the quantity — i.e. you may need 10 of those items to create a meal that meets your caloric needs. But the manufacturers don’t make it easy to figure that out.
- It’s Hard to Track — there’s not an easy way to see a consolidated view of what you’re buying or to identify what items in your pantry are the culprit of your high cost. Or more importantly, a view that shows nutritional bang for your buck.
If I’m being honest, I thought Dana was the primary reason my food budget had skyrocketed.
I’m a former CPA, I track every dollar I spend… and I knew my costs used to be ~$500 / mo on food, and now I was spending $2,000. Clearly it was all my wife’s fault. 😉 haha #wrong
In hindsight, I was a fool, and should have looked more closely at my own numbers, to realize $500 was so like 7 years ago … my bad food habits started before I ever got married.
I worked my way through college and got used to making $20 last for weeks. But after a couple of years and some nice promotions at Amazon, I found myself working late, eating out, and I loved treating friends/family to dinners. After all, I could afford it. I no longer had the financial constraints of a college student unless I artificially put them on myself. But before long, I was spending over $1K a month on food, whoops. And once we got married, I noticed it was routinely double that amount.
We were blessed to have an abundance, but as Jeff Bezos used to say… “frugality drives innovation.” Without constraints, we had very little impetus to innovate or invent a solution to our problem. We kept kicking the can down the road until we finally set a goal that required change, and then committed ourselves to achieving it.
Specifically, we set a reasonable goal of spending less than $900 / month. $550 on groceries and $350 on dining.
We Had a Goal but NO Plan
But after a few months, we were still above our goal. Why? … We Had a Goal but NO Plan.
So we made a Plan (you can read about it here), to eat XYZ types of food, and eat out once per week, etc. That helped, but we still couldn’t solve it. Why? We had a General Plan, but not a Specific Plan…
The Solution:
So we made a SUPER DETAILED Plan. Each meal, each ingredient in the meal, and then I nerded out, with a cost / calorie spreadsheet calculation and assigning a GRADE to each item. We figured out which stores and in which quantities of our core items had the best price / calorie, were healthiest, and then we stuck to buying just those.
One day I realized, I had created this novel thing … you’ve probably never heard of it before … it’s called a Grocery List. haha. 😉 K, so to be fair, it was quite a bit more detailed than a typical grocery list and it’s really more of a Long-Term Pantry Playbook — which you can find here.
Side note — the “health food” industry is killing our wallets making these “low calorie meals.” We all need a certain amount of calories each month to live (i.e. calories are energy/fuel), and giving us less of them while charging more, is like raising the price of gasoline to $20 / gallon but hiding it in the fact they are giving us 1 freaking OZ of fuel for $.15 …
If you didn’t catch that, $0.15 / oz is the same as $20 / gallon ya’ll.
Why this matters …
We tend to eat approximately the same calories each month, unless we’re drastically losing or gaining weight. So eating something with less calories just means you’ll need to eat more of it, or you’ll eat something else to make up for the deficit. AKA — spend more.
It should be mandatory for every food label to list how much you’d spend a month if you only ate that food
Let me give you some examples:
If you just ate Rice, you’d spend ~$100 / month on food
If you just drank Coffee for calories, you’d spend $15K / month
If you just ate Spinach, $4K / month
If you just ate Wild Alaskan Cod, $3K / month
If you just ate Amy’s Bowls Mushroom Risotto – $2K / month
As you can see there are wild differences, and super healthy items like Spinach and Wild Fish, can get expensive, as they tend to have higher cost / lower calories. Now it’s not all about calories, as there are macronutrients and micronutrients that are beyond important. But that’s why Dana and I built a detailed meal plan to enable clean, balanced, living on a budget.
And it’s legit! Like we eat real good.
I make these Gluten Free / Sugar Free Brownie’s, sometimes twice a week, because they are an A item … thanks Almond Flour and Coconut Oil. And I make a restaurant quality batch of Tom Kha Gai once or twice a month.
Dana makes Keto Pizza, Keto Pancakes, Mexican Polenta, and these Veggie Rice dishes with Asparagus, Bacon (nitrate free), Soft Goat Cheese, and Organic Mushrooms.
We eat Grass Fed / Grass Finished Beef, Wild Salmon, Organic Spinach, Organic Broccoli, Organic Cauliflower, Organic Sweet Potato hashes/dishes/mixes — you name it.
I got lucky when I married this RD Chef.
We’re not selling anything, I promise. Just sharing what we’ve learned.
We’ve read a ton / searched a lot / experimented over and over … and I can honestly say there are plenty of resources on “what to do” but very few on exactly “how to do it.”
So to recap:
- Eating Super Healthy on a Budget is Possible
- You have to make trade-offs
- You have to have a plan and stick to it
- We share our planning process, tools, food / meal grader (well cost anyways), and week by week meal plan, and a comprehensive “How To Guide” all on our solution page here.