Shaving Food Budget to Save in September

Currently two tasks are sucking up a good part of my free time – wedding planning with my daughter and preparing to teach Dave Ramsey at church in January. Talk about ying and yang! One is over the top conspicuous spending and one is over the top frugality.

To bring both upcoming events into focus, we are going to try to track our food spending of the month of September in real time and see if that ongoing tally can help us influence the spending. Latte habit, check. Tons of expensive fresh fruits and veggies, check. Eating out on weekends, yep. Treating ourselves and family to meals and desserts, guilty. I’m embarrassed to divulge how high the food category has crept. I used to say that our food budget was higher than rent for many in our lower income area. Now I have to say that our food budget rivals our own housing costs.

If we could shave a few hundred dollars off our food spending on a consistent basis, this could help in the short term to juggle college tuition, wedding costs, and a looming move to a higher cost city in the short term. And could go a long ways toward retirement savings and/or expanding our portfolio in the long term.

I was reading a BiggerPockets article on retirement spending, and it equates $30,000 of nest egg for each $100 of spending in retirement.