Food Buying Trends - Our Chart
Chart outlier warning: I signed up for Mint, the service I use to track my finances, a few months ago, so it doesn’t actually have a full month’s worth of data for December 2007.
What we spend on food and dining out is obviously a lot more than the “average” U.S. spending, according to Mint’s data. I want to know a little bit more about this “average” spending data that Mint uses because it seems to me that if they have a lot of singleton users (i.e, not families) then yes, their spending would be a lot lower because they are only feeding one person. So what I really want to compare myself to are those people who have Mint accounts who are feeding four people, not just one or two.
Regardless, I’ll bet we still spend more than the average, albeit the difference is probably not quite so drastic. The thing I am most happy about regarding this chart is that it shows how much we have cut back on our spending! We spent over $300 less on food and dining in April than we did in March. Yay!
Also, did anybody notice the counter-intuitive trending going on in the US average numbers? I mean, with all this talk about food prices increasing, why would it be that the last 3 months have shown average declines in the amount we are spending on food? The only thing I can think of is that an increasing proportion of less affluent Mint users are signing up over time, thus pulling the averages downward more and more every month. Something to ponder anyway!
