How much should a family spend on food? Each month, the USDA publishes an index of the price of food, to be used for government programs that feed people, budget estimates, and now you! There are different ranges, from thifty to liberal. My family uses the Moderate plan to set our food budget, and then we know what portion of our "needs" is allocated for food.
I first made a post to calculate these values in 2023, and I was going to just update it but thought you know, I'll keep the old one around. Someone might want to compare! So this one is based on January 2025 prices. If you are here to compare, you might notice that the prices creep up slowly, not dramatically. My family's expenses went from $1327 in 2023 to $1414 in 2025 - an increase of $87 a month, or about 6%. That is a bit of an increase but every time I feel like "things" are getting expensive, I force myself to look at what else I've bought that might be making my budget feel tighter, too.
This calculator lets you enter how many people are in your family, and tells you the recommended budgets. For example, if you're a single parent feeding three teenage sons (egads) enter a 3 in the 14-19 year old male range, and 1 for yourself in the adult range.
Privacy note: As with all my calculators I do not save any numbers you put in this form. It's all you, all on the browser side.
| Thrifty: | Low-cost: | Moderate: | Liberal: |
What I find especially interesting - when I put in my household of one adult female -
ReplyDeleteThrifty: $247 today vs $303 in 2023
Low-cost: $305 today vs $300 in 2023
Moderate: $382 today vs $376 in 2023
Liberal: $465 today vs $457 in 2023
so if you are frugal, you can pay less today than you did in 2023, otherwise you are paying a bit more - but not really significantly more.
Soooo how come I feel like everything is *significantly* more expensive!?!
I did drill down into the food plans themselves - some interesting data points
for females 19-50, the "low cost" food plan allots 3.62lbs of meat and eggs - the "moderate" plan, takes that down to 3.30lbs of meat and eggs - my instinct would have been that to save money, you would actually buy *less* meat? The liberal plan allots even less meat - 3.05lbs
But instead you get a LOT more veggies per week in the Moderate plan - 10.46lbs vs 7.13lbs (liberal 14.22)
Less fruit - 6.64 vs 8.02 (liberal gets 11.06)
More milk products 13.40 vs 11.87 (liberal gets 14.22)
Other is an interesting category - the low cost plan gets 4.86lbs of "other" - which includes 4.13lbs of soft drinks and juices. The moderate plan goes down to 1.75 with 0.72lbs of soft drinks and juices.
Then the liberal plan goes up to 3.02 - with 2.74lbs of soft drinks
These numbers are fascinating - I wonder what the psychology is behind them? When you have more discretionary income to put toward groceries, you stop buying sodas? I thought - maybe you switch from sodas to real fruit juices? But no - the low cost plan has more fruit juices than the moderate or liberal plans?