Budget Emails from Katie

If you’re just on my monthly email list (instead of weekly) or if you missed some of the grocery budget emails from July/Aug 2026, here they are!

I did the grocery budget homework and OH NO 😬

I figured out what we spend on food per month recently.

I had tons of work I needed to do, so of course I was reading emails looking for a distraction.

Past #LifeSkillsNow camp leaders Jonathan and Amanda Teixeira from WalletWin sent an email about how much groceries should actually cost. I got worried when I read this:

You may have seen the USDA “food plan” numbers floating around. Search “usda food plan three levels may 2026” to see them for yourself.

Respectfully? They’re wildly inflated. (Their “liberal” plan for a family our size would be genuinely unhinged. 😂)

My heart fell, and I had a bad feeling inside. What if …

What if my family was actually at that liberal plan level? I was off to do my newsletter homework and figure it out.

Jonathan and Amanda recommended adding up food expenses for the last 90 days, then dividing by three for one month, and dividing by the number of people in your family.

Here’s the reply I sent to WalletWin:

This is so humbling; because I’m pretty sure when we had one toddler, our entire family’s food and supply budget was around what we spend for one person now. Granted, the quality of food I choose has changed, but also, ouch!

If your brain and pocketbook aren’t hurting yet, check this out …We did the math to figure out what Leah’s university food plan would cost per week, so that we could give her our “50% fair share,” since she’s cooking for herself instead of going to the cafeteria.These college students’ poor parents are paying $720 a month for 14 meals a week. (For most that doesn’t include breakfast!)

Ouch! Ouch! And double ouch!!

So, is it important for our kids to learn to cook for themselves? You bet!

Is grocery budgeting and saving money wherever we can a skill that we need to pass to our future adults, whether they’re currently 5 or 15? Holy cow, yes!

Here are a few resources for you if getting a healthy dinner on the table within budget is a new school year or fall goal.

One, my original blog Kitchen Stewardship is filled with frugal recipes and budget-saving ideas. Just search around for something that speaks to you.

If you want to read about my real grocery budget pains in 2015, cry a little at the numbers I thought were high at the time, and get some solid tips to slash your own, here’s a post that takes me down memory lane!

Two, the What’s for Dinner Summit is a free three-day online event offering expert tips, recipes, and meal planning strategies to simplify dinner for families. We know that cooking for yourself always saves money over buying pre-made convenience food or going out to eat.

Improving your system so that you can cook at home more often is a win all around! (This event is no longer available.)

Three, teach your teens to cook! When you register for the What’s for Dinner Summit, you’ll get access to my contribution, called “Real Skills: Helping Teens Own a Night of Dinner.”

I’ll give you a structure so that a preteen or teen can smoothly take over a night of cooking dinner per week, and you’ll even get a demo video from Teens Cook Real Food to inspire you.

Want to Share Your Grocery Budget?

If you feel like doing the homework, or maybe you already know your grocery budget, hit the link below that best fits your family. Your answer will be automatically recorded. I’ll let you know next week how the numbers shake out for this community!

• $150 per person in my family or less
• $150-200 per person
• $200-300 per person
• $300-400 per person
• Over $400 per person
• I have no idea what we spend on groceries

And feel free to hit reply to distract me from work if you want to share how you do (or don’t) work hard to keep the grocery spending in check!

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could you spend $1 per meal? 😵‍💫

II just wrote an $85 check for really well-raised, high-quality pork from the farmers’ market. I thought, oof, that’s almost a third of what Wendy spends on food the whole month!

(It will not be a third of even our meat, I anticipate.)

Next week, I’ll grab 20 dozen eggs from my favorite farmer for a real steal of a deal, in fact: $80. Again, I will think, oof, that’s almost a third of what Wendy spends on the whole month of food.

I spent $54 at one farmers’ market stand for produce that won’t even last us a week. And again, I thought, there’s no way Wendy can buy this kind of produce!

Who’s Wendy, you ask? She’s a member of the community who responded to last week’s grocery budgeting email, sharing that for herself, her husband, and a teenage son about to launch, she spends $260 per month–for all three of them combined.

That’s right, not per person.

For three people!! 😮

My husband and I were talking about it in awe and realized that’s approximately $1 per meal per person.

I said, “That means you can’t even have one quarter-pound grassfed burger!” That would be spending $1.50 before the bun, before mustard or ketchup or any sides. This feels impossible.

I’m curious if Wendy’s family is vegan or vegetarian, and just how much beans, rice, and oatmeal they eat. But in my response, I didn’t ask.

Instead, I explained my own reasoning.

That I choose to spend more on quality food on purpose.

I choose get fresh fruits and vegetables and well-raised meats because I see it as an investment, a bit of an insurance policy for our future health: the expense, the suffering, and the time spent in doctors’ offices.

I also take joy in supporting local farmers, because I have the money to spend. It’s a conscious choice.

I explained to Wendy that my budget is quite small when it comes to less health-related items like clothing, decorations, and entertainment.

It really is amazing how different choices can be from family to family, and how big of an impact it can have on that financial bottom line.

Last week, I shared that we spend around $350 per person per month. This is much, much higher than it was a decade ago, and perhaps it’s higher than it should be.

But it is a conscious choice.

Curious what other people in this Raising Healthy Families community spend on groceries? Here are the results of last week’s poll on how much you spend per person, per month on groceries:

• $150 or less – 18.8%
• $150-200 – 18.8%
• $200-300 – 24.1%
• $300-400 – 14.6%
• over $400 – 8.5%
• no idea how much – 15.2%

Not many people are up where I am, and Wendy would say, “Katie, that’s not something to aspire to.”

And if that means you don’t want to listen to me when I talk about saving money on food, that’s okay. That can be my past life. 😝

Ironically, I do still take measures to trim the grocery budget. It just doesn’t seem to shake out that way.

Here are a few good tips from readers about saving on that grocery budget:

• Buy in bulk when possible, from places like Azure Standard and Vitacost (and purchase when they run the best sales, like around Black Friday). I generally buy from Country Life Foods.
• Purchase a whole cow’s meat from a farmer.
• Use cash envelopes for purchasing.
• Get less expensive fruits and veggies at the farmers’ market or at a u-pick.

Turns out, pretty much the same things that have always worked, alongside good meal planning!

Yours, Katie

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okay, I opened a can of worms … 🪱

I didn’t realize the can of worms I’d be opening when I started jibber-jabbering about my current grocery budget a few weeks back!

If you’ve missed them (hello, it’s August, you don’t really want to be on your phone anyway!), I’ll catch you up:

Two weeks ago, I wrote that I’d crunched my grocery budget and discovered, with some small dismay, that we spend about $350 per person per month around here. I asked readers what they spend, and last week I shared the results of the poll along with trophy winner Wendy, who only spends $260 per month for three adults total (NOT per person!).

I mused that although I could spend less, I make intentional choices to spend more on the groceries because I see it as an investment in my health.

Two readers reached out with gentle, loving chastisement and an important perspective reminder for me. We had what I think is a great conversation, and they both gave me permission to quote them in this week’s email.

Here’s what April and Tami wrote to me:

• “When over 60% of your readers respond they are spending less than $300 a week on food, and almost 40% less than $200, have you considered not everyone has that choice or luxury to spend more? … Does Wendy spend less because it’s a fun game? Or is it because she has no other choice to feed her family?”
  
• “Maybe Wendy wants to be like you but can’t afford it. If I didn’t eat ‘the bad stuff,’ I wouldn’t eat. I am blessed that I can buy Fiesta ground turkey for $2 a lb.”
  
• “I’d love to buy lettuce at our local farmers market, but at $6-8 a head, that’s unrealistic. It would barely be enough for one meal.”
  
• At $1.38 for five grams protein, even on sale the grassfed meat sticks aren’t in many people’s budgets.
  
• “I think food insecurity and healthy choice availability are very complicated issues. The idea of ‘know better, do better’ is complicated—what if you know better, but can’t afford better food options? On the flip side, if you never learn about healthier choices then you never have the option to do better either.”

I replied that I totally get it. It’s definitely a concern to me that I came across as tone deaf or high and mighty. 😢

I explained to April that certainly some of the products I share are more expensive, even on sale, than the least expensive option. They have to have enough profit margin and be sold nationwide for them to have an affiliate program to share commissions.

However, I try to stay true to my roots and always mention when I’m using a strategy that is less expensive or even no cost.

Someone recently asked what I do for hand soap, and when I sent them this post describing how I refill foaming soap containers, I thought, yeah, that’s about right, just what I try to do. One pricey yet affordable product, depending on your budget, and the other as cheap as it gets.

In spite of the fact that I’m now in a place where I have a bit more expendable income, I do still remember those humble roots. Look for my whole 2006 budget breakdown in an email next week! (+ some more thoughts on how we make things work the best we can with the resources we have).

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I found my entire 2006 budget [monthly]

I’ve spent August talking about grocery budgeting and budgeting in general, thanks to a WalletWin email that had me actually calculating what we spend on groceries.

Because of this, I’ve had some good conversations via email with folks holding all sorts of opinions:

• Plenty who are also spending a lot more nowadays 🙁
• Some who thanked me for making them feel normal (or that they’re doing pretty well!)
• And a few who think I’ve gone off the rails and came across pretty entitled (eek)

If you’re only subscribed to monthly emails and you’d like to see any of those, just hit reply and I’d be happy to forward them to you!

I came across a single page with our family’s entire 2006 budget on it recently, back when the family included only two adults and one toddler aged 8-20 months. Every penny was accounted for!

The sheet showed my work comparing category percentages against some sort of “official” recommendations for how money should be spent, and I was pretty close on many and under on some (which is good because a 10% tithe wasn’t included in the math).

The most notable and jaw-dropping lines in my opinion include:

• Total spent on food: $3,401.84. That was 7.4% of the year’s income, well below the 12% recommended.
• Clothing: $230.74, just half a percent, well under the 5% I would have been allotted.
• “Baby,” which includes all diapers and anything else I bought just for Paul. Not sure if his clothing is in this line or the one above: $586.42.

My husband earned the money, except for a few thousand I brought in teaching six hours a week; the rest of my job—other than parenting—was to pinch those pennies and make our budget work at all costs.

We put right about 5% into his 401k (the recommended amount) and had a mere $1,600 left for liquid savings at the end of the year.

Two years later, I launched Kitchen Stewardship, started teaching others what I knew in the kitchen and with finances, and also began to change the way we ate, trying to make improvements in whole foods and quality. (In fact, Kitchen Stewardship began because I quit teaching, and that budget flipped into the red juuuuust enough that I needed to figure something out!)

And now here I am: doing my best to help you prepare your kids, teens, and young adults to make good choices, whether that’s the quality of their food or staying in that tiny new-married-couple budget.

I know it can be a big-time struggle, and I hope that more often than not, I’m that voice saying, “Just try your best for whole foods and don’t worry too much about the rest! Here are a few tips…”

Far more than half the battle of health is won in cooking with your own ingredients, getting some time outdoors, and trying to get sufficient sleep and movement in your day. Those last three don’t cost a thing beyond intention! (And time…I know, another limited resource…)