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I live in Berlin Germany. I've been manually tracking all my grocery costs over 2 years now in an Google Spreadsheet. I'm a single person and I buy organic food
by timdaub 5y ago
I live in Berlin Germany. I've been manually tracking all my grocery costs over 2 years now in an Google Spreadsheet. I'm a single person and I buy organic food. I work from home and I don't eat a lot outside. I cook probably on average 1.5 times a day. My general monthly bill on food is 600€. My methodology has been this:
- I pay all my groceries with my debit card
- Then, to get the cost for a month; I take all debit card entries in my online banking and sum them up
- I then compare the finding to older findings.
Last time I checked, the costs of my groceries hasn't gone up. So far, it has never gone up in any significant form over the last two years. Maybe by 5% but by no means +50% like the parent post suggests.
I sometimes also get anxious about "inflation" when the cashier quotes an unexpected price. And it's why I've started double checking my intuition with the above-outlined process.
Indeed, some times the shopping ends up more expensive as e.g. I bought an extra pack of coffee or meat.
- jacobr1 5y agoYou would also need to consider if you changed any purchase habits. If you comparison shop, or focus on buying whatever cut of meat is on sale, or similar, then you might actually be buying a different distribution of items.
- timdaub 5y agoActually, I probably only buy meat every second week. And I've been consistently going to the same shop.
- pengaru 5y agoYour method doesn't control for shrinkflation[0] if only looking at your debit card statements. [0] https://www.mouseprint.org/category/downsiz/ https://www.mouseprint.org/category/downsiz/ Edit: Humans aren't robots folks, if there's consistently some excess food being disposed of it could simply mean there's slightly less going into the wastebin. And regarding TP, I don't know about you, but I tend to be wasteful with TP when the roll is fresh and increasingly frugal as the roll approaches empty. This is all highly subjective but the fact is people tend to be inconsistent and wasteful. You need to track normalized unit costs for such data to be reliable. Package sizes are constantly being manipulated, period.
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- monkeynotes 5y agoIf, say toilet roll, is smaller quantities wouldn't you end up buying more of it which will also reflect in your monthly budget?
- rsj_hn 5y agoUnless he is eating less and less, it should control for that.
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- jonnycomputer 5y agoWouldn't it though? I mean, caloric intake doesn't fluctuate much. If smaller sizes were ending up leaving this person hungry, presumably they'd end up buying more to compensate.
- wonderwonder 5y agoNot generally. Vast majority of people eat well past simple hunger satiation. In regards to non edible goods, a few less sheets per paper towel role would likely not be noticed in the short term but taken over a year would like reflect an extra role or 2 purchased.
- timdaub 5y agoI have managed to maintain a body mass of 90kg but nice try!
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agodoes CPI control for shrinkflation? correctly? fully?
- lexapro 5y ago>My general monthly bill on food is 600€. This is crazy, are you on a meat only diet or do you go to very expensive restaurants? Otherwise I struggle to believe it.
- goodpoint 5y ago20 euros a day for 3 meals? That would be on the cheap side in a number of cities.
- the-dude 5y ago> and I buy organic food Whatever that means, but it sounds expensive.
- timdaub 5y agoorganic food "Bio" is wildly expensive here in Germany... Also: the 600€ is groceries only. I don't track the cost of going to restaurants. It'd probably significantly increase total food costs.
- lexapro 5y agoI know the prices in Germany. I can see how one would spend €300 or even €400... but €600 just seems a lot. Maybe if you eat a lot of expensive imported items and such.
- wonderwonder 5y agoI don't really see anything crazy about this. Poster eats organic food and lives in an expensive city. If he works out he probably consumes a good amount of food.
- danaris 5y agoThat's not at all crazy. Spending 600 euros or dollars monthly on food for a single person is actually quite reasonable—as another commenter pointed out, it's about 20 euros per day for all three meals. In my experience, "moderately expensive" restaurants (I don't actually go to what I'd term "very expensive" restaurants) come in at $40-50 per plate. That means that just for dinner, if they were going to very expensive restaurants every day they'd be paying roughly twice what they quoted.