I am pretty tired now that my family’s left from their visit.  I love them and adore their visits.  But I feel somewhat overwhelmed by my family.  In my family food = love.  The more food you provide, the more you love your family.  I realized that I have serious food issues mostly from my family.

I used to control our food budget rigidly when we were very broke.  Then we suddenly made 4x the money and our budget went out the window.  I haven’t been honest about it until now because I don’t have complete records of our spending for the first 9 months of our move, but I just feel like we spent a lot of money.  I know we should have easily $6-10k more from those months of wild spending.

Beginning the summer of 2006 I began to get a greater handle on our spending because I needed to with DH starting school.  And in 2007 I began in earnest tracking our spending and curbing it.  Not exactly budgeting firmly, but setting limits. 

I do not budget to the penny even now and if I go over or under by $20 it isn’t a big deal.  But just being aware of our spending really helps.  Turns out I made the move to becoming more financially aware of our spending at the right time.  I’m not sure how I would have dealt with the upturn in spending for groceries due to substantially higher costs over the past year if I hadn’t started to curb our habits.

This week with my family has been eye opening.  I realize that my habits for food shopping and spending money comes from them.  And my DH has no problems spending the same way, turns out his family is the same. 

But back to what happened, we made multiple trips to grocery stores.  Yet in every store each family member went hog wild and bought tons of food.  They bought stuff they liked and just tossed it in the card.  This is how they shop.  Carts are filled with snacks, fruits, veggies, etc.  It was a free for all galore. 

I realized this is probably how the majority of people shop.  But the problem is most people cannot afford to shop and eat without caring about prices.  Even DH and I can’t.  We have a good income but a good amount of expenses as well.  But it is really easy to slip into this habit. 

I think for us personally it’s easier to justify spending on food than anything else.  Yes we can say no to eating out, because it’s obvious how expensive it is.  But when you stand in the grocery store you feel virtuous because you aren’t eating out or drinking out.  But then in your head you start to justify buying whatever you want because you aren’t “overspending/overindulging”.  It’s a funny mindset that it’s “okay” to buy what you want in a grocery store rather than go out to eat.

I am not sure if we’ll ever break this habit.  It’s likely something we’ll have to be consciously aware of for the rest of our lives.  However I am thinking that perhaps in the future we may not need to be so aware because we’ll make enough money to truly indulge our food passions.  But for now check out the counter in my kitchen.

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