In 2021, my Wealth Planner showed me a number I was proud of: $7,281 on food for the entire year. That is $606 a month for groceries, takeout, and restaurant meals combined. Some months in 2020, I kept it under $300 total.
Stretching groceries past their sell-by date was basically my superpower.
So here is the part where that superpower vanished: in 2022, my husband and I spent $25,779 on food. That is $12,889 per person. An average of $2,148 a month, flushed down the toilet.
Did we start checking off Michelin-star restaurants? Discover a food allergy that sent us to expensive health stores? No. It was lifestyle creep — the quiet way your spending stretches when your income does.
2022 was the second year I earned what felt like a lot of money. More money meant more careless swipes on my takeout budget. We hired a local chef for meal prep. I spent nearly $250 a week on Sakara Life delivery for a few months. When all else failed, there was always my Cheba Hut BLT — $22 after delivery and tip.
The moment we decided to reverse it
In November 2022, I sat down with our spending data. The food category was a Corolla-sized number on the spreadsheet. “We’ve got to get this under control,” I told my husband.
Then we went out for dumplings and boba tea to celebrate our commitment to prudence. Old habits die hard.
What reversing lifestyle creep actually looked like
A year later, the results were clear: we averaged $1,725 a month on food in 2023 — about $862 per person. Adjusted for inflation, my 2021 spending of $606 a month would be roughly $751 today. So we were not quite back to single-person frugality, but we were nowhere near the $2,148 peak.
That works out to around $5,000 in additional savings for the year. Not life-changing money — though compounding has a way of making unsexy numbers interesting over time.
The real surprise was not the dollars saved. It was what I learned about outsourcing.
Why doing things yourself matters more than you think
I used to believe that outsourcing everything was the financially optimal choice. Hire someone to cook, and suddenly you have extra hours for work or rest. The math checks out on paper.
A viral Reddit thread put it better than I can: when you outsource cooking, cleaning, shopping, and childcare all at once, your sense of self-worth ends up in the same basket as your job. Step by step, you start living someone else’s life — eating other people’s food, wearing clothes you did not pick, moving through a hotel room instead of a home.
The thread’s advice is simple: it might be worth developing an interest in cooking or joining a gym you like. But also — screw cleaning. Pick your battles.
I contradict myself often enough to know this is true. Sometimes spending money on help is the right call. Sometimes saving money by doing things yourself is wiser. Real life does not fit into neat categories, and anyone who stays perfectly consistent in their opinions for years is probably not being honest with themselves.
How I actually cook (and what I eat)
Experimenting with meal outsourcing taught me something: I value the tactile creativity of cooking. Most days, the countdown timer on dinner pulls me away from my computer screen in a way that closing a browser tab never does.
I wasted years telling myself I did not know how to cook instead of just learning.
My process is straightforward:
- I shop at Whole Foods for the meat and produce selection, order online for free pickup. Jeff Bezos’s team are genuinely good at the grocery business — hard as that is for me to admit.
- We eat dinner at home five or six nights a week. Takeout fills the off nights, usually Fridays. I grew up with pizza or Chinese food on Friday nights, so my brain has permanently wired “junk food” to that day of the week.
- After working with a nutritionist and trainer this year — shout-out to Andrew and Kat at Alta Fit for Life — I prioritize protein, fat, fiber, and vegetables in every meal. Simple carbs and refined sugar get minimized wherever possible.
Healthy snacking costs money but is worth it. Lately: cottage cheese (Good Culture brand), Chomps meat sticks, and RXBars in chocolate sea salt. Right now we are loving a peanut chicken ramen dish — the original BudgetBytes recipe is super cheap — along with Korean ground beef with cucumber salad, butter-lettuce cheeseburgers, and miso salmon on ginger rice.
What I’m watching next
I am still nervous about what my full 2023 spending data will reveal. I have a feeling it will show that my fixed costs crept higher — and those are harder to unwind than a greasy Five Guys habit.
But here is what I know now: I can reverse lifestyle creep. That alone gives me more confidence than any budget spreadsheet ever could.
Three things you can do this week
- Pull up your last 12 months of bank statements and highlight the food category. You might be surprised by how much lifestyle creep added to it — and knowing the number is half the battle.
- Pick one area where you outsourced out of convenience, not necessity. Cooking, meal prep, or grocery delivery are great places to start. Bring that back in-house for a month and see how it feels.
- Set a weekly food budget and track it. Not daily — weekly is forgiving enough to stick with. Open your banking app tonight and note three food purchases from this week. That is all you need to begin.
Slow progress still counts. Financial control is one meal, one grocery trip, one mindful swipe at a time.