Budget Backwards

I'm lucky. I have enough money to buy groceries. Given this fact, how do I plan my food spending, now and in the future? I have decided that the best thing to do is to see how much money I spend, at first without budgeting, and then to maintain the same level of spending. It might be fun, a good idea, or wise, to lower this amount of money over time, but striving to keep the same level of spending is possible and realistic. My method for keeping track of spending is simply to gather the week's receipts in my purse until they add up to the magic number (I was five dollars under, last week!!), then stop spending on groceries. I will have to increase the degree of challenge by adding in restaurant meals, but I'm not ready for that yet. I'll be lucky if I remember to add in receipts from my trips to High's. At present, my plan for restaurant dining is to make sure I'm not dining out at the end of each grocery week, after I've run out of grocery money.

One result of seeing how much I spend is that I can think about this money as one chunk of the household spending, instead of as many dribs and drabs. If I know that I spend $600 a month on groceries, I can think about how much it would cost to spend some of it on home milk delivery, and how much money would be left to spend on the rest of the groceries. I can also think about how much less I would spend on milk (about half) if I switched from organic milk to regular. Thinking about the real makes it easier to think about the possible and the impossible.

I learned, probably from reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, that Americans spend about 10% of their income on food, whereas Europeans spend about 17% of income. I wonder how much my household spends? I would have to multiply that $600 by 12 to get $7,200, then add all restaurant spending, then compare that to our annual income. This is a homework problem that will not be solved for a while.