Our weekly food bill has nearly doubled since 2003 - now costs $160.00 a week!

Many will know that the price of food has gone up lately. We spent $85.00 a week in 2003 and $110.00 on a big week on food in 2006. I commented to someone during the past week how food has gone up, and estimated that our bill had jumped up to about $150.00 an average week - that's for a family of four. They didn`t believe me. But they don`t shop like we do.

So I checked. We eat healthily, have three decent meals a day and pay all or food on the credit card. And, according to the statements, since the beginning of February we have spent $1949.54 on food. That's $162 a week on average. Thats just $20 a week more than the average family spent on food five years ago. Yet our spend includes all supermarket and meat purchases, food, wine, toilet paper, pullups, cleaning and cooking products , most lunches - and the odd magazine. It also includes the food for our two kid's birthday parties, which was an extra expense. However it does not include coffee at cafes- add $10-12.00 a week - the one cafe brunch we had, or the two trips we have made to McDonald's this year. It doesn't include our monthly fish and chip nite, veges we`ve bought at roadside stalls -but then again that hasn`t happened much this year as the increased petrol price means it is not worth travelling to such stalls anymore.

We don't skimp, we have healthy meals every day - meat fruit veges etc. How do we do it? Well, that`ll be a subject of a future post, when I get time to outline it all.