How to Calculate Average Cost of Groceries Per Person

You'll need to figure out the average cost of groceries per person whenever you are trying to plan or budget expenses for your family, or even in a roommate situation where expenses are shared. By taking the time to compute average cost of groceries per person you can dial in your food budget accordingly, and get the most out of your money by shopping smart and within your financial abilities.

Instructions

1. Begin with an empty, full size notebook. Start with a clean page and write down all of the names of the people in your family or household leaving space underneath for additional calculations. If you have a very large household this might take up to two pages, especially if your writing tends to be large.

2. Make an additional section underneath each name for each meal of the day. This should include breakfast, lunch, dinner, and at least one snack. These are the sections where you'll estimate each person's meals for the day and their basic food consumption, which will help you figure average cost of groceries per person.

3. Take the time to consider what each person eats in a day and fill that in for each meal. If you live with these people you should have a pretty good idea of what they eat, especially if they are in your family. Do this for every person in your household so that you have a complete list. Make this list for one day only, because in the later steps you can use simple math to estimate for the remainder of the month.

4. Create four columns on a second page which are labeled breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. These will be cumulative columns for the total of what every person eats combined. You will have to use some estimation here, but if you take your time you can get pretty close. For example, using the breakfast column, add up what each person eats for breakfast in one day and add that figure together cumulatively with everyone else's amount of food in the new breakfast column. You might end up with a figure like five bowls of cereal, five bananas, two glasses of orange juice, etc. This would be an example of what three people might eat combined for breakfast in one day. Do this for each meal of the day.

5. Go to the grocery store with your notebook and walk around looking at prices and calculate how much money each daily cumulative meal would cost. For example, if you are still looking at the total of what three people would eat for breakfast you'd have to account for what five bowls of cereal, five bananas, and two glasses of orange juice might cost. Look at the prices per pound on bananas, serving size in cereal and also in orange juice. Look at the prices on the food and divide that by the servings to get a basic idea of how much one serving will cost. Calculate this using your own figures, and for each meal.

6. Come up with a number for each meal cumulatively and put that next to each total meal for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Then add the numbers together in each column to get the total daily cost for food for all the meals combined. If it costs three people together $5 to eat breakfast, $5 for lunch, $15 for dinner, and $5 for snacks, your daily average cost of food for three people would be 5+5+15+5 = $30 per day to feed three people.

7. Using that daily figure, multiply it by 30 for the 30 days which are in a month. So in this example $30x30 days in a month = $900 per month for three people. Divide this figure by the amount of people, which in this case would be 3, so $900/3 = $300 is the average cost of groceries per person each month.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't underestimate how much money can be saved by using coupons any buying things that are on sale. If you take the time to practice smart shopping like that, you can dramatically lower the amount of money that you spend on groceries.