The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: CindyBS on December 31, 2015, 06:21:33 PM
-
First post here . . .
My husband and I have 10 year old and 12 year old sons. They are both the kind of boys that eat an enormous amount of food and stay very thin (unfortunately not inherited from me). One hand is shoveling food in the mouth while the other is keeping their pants from falling down. lol.
Anyway, we are pretty low spenders and after savings, housing and income taxes, our next biggest expense is food. I only anticipate the food spending to go up as my very hungry caterpillars become full on teenagers. We are crunching some #'s and trying to figure out some realistic numbers for spending post FI, which is on track to happen as they are moving out.
How much did your spending on food go down when your son(s) moved out? Short of measuring everything they eat- I'm not sure how to figure this amount out. I am just guessing that my boys are currently eat 66-75% of the food we buy.
-
Following out of curiosity because I have three boys 7, 5, and 1!
-
They level off after going through puberty but if they are very active they will continue to outeat an adult right through high school. My kids are pretty spread out (6 kids over 21 years) so I can't say for sure a dollar amount (as the cost of food just keeps going up and up) but I'd say about $100-125 per kid as they moved out. I spend about $500 per month for food for 5 of us (one more just moved out this week so that should go down a bit more too) and when we had 5 kids at home I was spending around $950 per month (infant, 5yo son, 12yo son 14yo dd, 17yo son and oldest was a dd in college) but that would be well over 1k now since this was in 2008/2009 (peak food spending!! it was more than our mortgage). Boys will eat and eat and eat...try to fill them up on cheaper proteins and fewer grains and it helps some but they are bottomless pits. Girls can eat a lot too when growing but nothing compared to boys.
-
Hard to say. I've got the two youngest boys DS4 and DS5 still at home. I will say that the board part of R&B at college is stupid expensive compared to buying actual food, so "feeding boys" expenses don't go down until they are out of college. Then they develop more expensive food choices/tastes, when they are home on breaks.
And which sport they are currently engaged in affects hunger levels. Swimming was worse than XC or track - DS2 would finish dinner and be scrounging in the cabinet to follow up with sandwiches because he was still starving.
-
We didn't chart our costs on a spreadsheet, but I said when our son moved out, our grocery bill was cut in half. Of course we always seemed to be feeding his friends too. Adolescent boys eat a ton of food!
-
First post here . . .
My husband and I have 10 year old and 12 year old sons. They are both the kind of boys that eat an enormous amount of food and stay very thin (unfortunately not inherited from me). One hand is shoveling food in the mouth while the other is keeping their pants from falling down. lol.
Anyway, we are pretty low spenders and after savings, housing and income taxes, our next biggest expense is food. I only anticipate the food spending to go up as my very hungry caterpillars become full on teenagers. We are crunching some #'s and trying to figure out some realistic numbers for spending post FI, which is on track to happen as they are moving out.
How much did your spending on food go down when your son(s) moved out? Short of measuring everything they eat- I'm not sure how to figure this amount out. I am just guessing that my boys are currently eat 66-75% of the food we buy.
son grew up and blessed me with four grandchildren. Three of which are boys. Now they all come over a couple of times a week and eat me out of house and home. Plus I spend way too much money on them for christmas and birthdays... No savings here.