Our detailed food cost breakdown - $90/month

[ender]

I have itemized my roommates and my receipts for the six months, January through June of this year, by category. We are three single guys in our 20s. We consider we eat pretty healthy and probably do eat healthier than almost all single guys in their 20's.

Some observations:

 - Average of $90/person, per month
 - We have guests over frequently
 - We have fruit/vegetables often
 - We shop most of the time based on, "what's a good deal?" especially fresh produce
 - We live in the midwest
 - We feel we eat quite luxuriously and normally cook our own meals
 - We make our own bread often
 - We buy in bulk at Sam's Club and when items are on sale (meat especially is almost always bought on sale). We bought 30 boxes of brownie mix @ $0.99 a box because it's normally $2.50 and we use this somewhat often...
 - Chicken/pork are considerably cheaper than beef

Here is a here to a google doc. There are also two levels of categories, one more detailed than the other. Almost all the frozen food we buy is frozen vegetables.

(also posted on reddit)

[FIRE_guy]

This is a great little tool. It's been on my "Next Actions" list for a while now to build one of these for myself.

You mentioned that you buy a lot of stuff in large quantities. I'm assuming when you buy 30 boxes of brownies, they lasted across multiple months...what I'm getting at: have you ever considered building out this sheet to give it the ability to calculate the cost of meals day-by-day? I'd be really interested to see if that's possible.

eg: make a meal plan on sunday, enter some high level recipe details and the sheet calculates a cost, $/serving, of each meal.

[partgypsy]

Is there a way to cut and paste or too long? I can't read the doc.

[Diniecita]

I have itemized my roommates and my receipts for the six months, January through June of this year, by category. We are three single guys in our 20s. We consider we eat pretty healthy and probably do eat healthier than almost all single guys in their 20's.

Some observations:

 - Average of $90/person, per month
 - We have guests over frequently
 - We have fruit/vegetables often
 - We shop most of the time based on, "what's a good deal?" especially fresh produce
 - We live in the midwest
 - We feel we eat quite luxuriously and normally cook our own meals
 - We make our own bread often
 - We buy in bulk at Sam's Club and when items are on sale (meat especially is almost always bought on sale). We bought 30 boxes of brownie mix @ $0.99 a box because it's normally $2.50 and we use this somewhat often...
 - Chicken/pork are considerably cheaper than beef

Here is a here to a google doc. There are also two levels of categories, one more detailed than the other. Almost all the frozen food we buy is frozen vegetables.

(also posted on reddit)

Have you thought about learning how to make brownies from scratch? I have a great EASY recipe if you are interested. Let me know. If you can make bread...you can make these. I've been making them for years and the original recipe called for chocolate squares, which are too expensive so I altered it to use cocoa and it's exactly the same... my husband can't even tell.

[Gimesalot]

Nice!  I love how a lot of the people on reddit think that you are either living somewhere where food is insanely cheap or how you are eating garbage.

We live in New Orleans, which I consider to be much more expensive than Chicago for food, and we spend about $160 a month for two people, although that may be because my husband gets to eat for free at work several times a week.

[tonysemail]

wow, that is really awesome!