You say "budget" I say "huh?"

This weekend we bought a tub of cool whip for a pumpkin pie. I made the pie. It was good. This is all completely off topic but I wanted to point out the pie since I never, in fact, make pie. well almost never, which is how the pie in question here came into being.

The top of the cool whip had a contest advertised on it. Groceries for a Year! it proclaimed in bold colorful letters with a cutsy graphic of a grocery cart with generic food items in it. Pretty standard food item contest and graphic so it didnt' really register until I turned over the cardboard top. "A $10,000 value." yeah, $10,000 for one year of groceries. Are you kidding me? Who the heck spends $800 a month on gorceries? If I wanted to spend that I could go out to eat three times a week and eat steak the rest. It seems so excessive to me. I guess if I spent $800 a month I could afford to cook the stuff in the magazine recipes.

I once read Flylady make the assumtion that my food budget was the second largest expense in my budget. I guess food is expensive to a lot of people. It used to look too expensive to my husband until I sent him out to do the shopping. He did most of the grocery shopping for about six months before he stopped complaining about how much I spent. Oh, he didn't really complain. He just held his breath at me. Did a slight, almost not there head tilt and didn't say anything for about a minute.

So what are people spending on food? Are there a lot of people spending $800 on food for their average family of four or five? That just seems like so much to me. You could spend half as much a month, save the difference and pay for a week at Disneyland at the end of a year, and never once had your family feel like they didn't have enough to eat. I know I could spend less, of course I would get tired of spagetti, leg quarters, and potatoes, but I could spend about $100 less a month if we needed to. Right now I'm not feeling like we need to, but after that Disneyland comment I just wrote, I'm thinking I might need to cut back on some groceries. ;) I couldn't take everyone to disney after one year, but $1200 would sure pay for something fun.