Quantified Awesome: Grocery update – Oct 2012 » sacha chua

Quantified Awesome: Grocery update – Oct 2012

Posted on October 24th, 2012 by Sacha Chua

I’d gotten into the habit of scanning my receipts and sending them over to one of my virtual assistants, but I hadn’t analyzed the numbers in a while. I finally sat down and spent 23 minutes categorizing the new items from the line-item breakdown of our receipts. With the categories in place, I could update my reports (another half-hour or so). So here we are – almost a half-year update.

That works out to an average of $395.36 per month (looking at May-September) for 2.7 people (W-, me, and J-, who spends weekends at her mom’s), or $146 per person. I think we eat quite well. Yummy lunches all ready to go, dinners at home, various favourites making their appearance, and even a party or two somewhere in there…

September is interesting – I was away for two weeks, and W- bought a lot of vegetables. Maybe if I let him take the lead in planning recipes and making a list, we’ll ramp up vegetable-eating again. =) It’s also interesting to see the regularity of our egg-buying patterns.

Here are the top 10 individual items in terms of money spent:

I’ve been curious about sale patterns and comparing prices between places. We get our lamb shanks from a butcher and they’re priced by weight, so I haven’t been tracking fluctuations. Organic milk is $9.99 except for that one time we tried a different brand that was on sale for $6.99. Shrimp prices vary a bit depending on the kind of shrimp; we now often get peeled shrimp for convenience. We switched from buying small $7.49 bags of brown rice to the bigger $14.99 bags (way more than twice the rice, although we have to get this from an Asian market). We’ve also upgraded from the small bag of sushi rice ($12.98) to the huge bag of sushi rice ($22.99). We used to be able to get chicken leg quarters for around $2.50 in May, but now they’re more like $4.5-$5.0 per package (can’t find the halal chicken leg quarters). Cherries started off at 4.34 a kilo, dipped to 3.24, went up to 4.34, and were at 2.14 in August. Extra large eggs are between $4.27 and $4.47. Mozzarella is $2.99 normally and $2.29 on sale.

In total, I’ve spent $10.98 on delegation (including bonuses) in order to get this data, and an hour here and there every time I want to crunch the numbers. =) Not bad. I like getting a sense of how we’re doing, and it will be interesting to see personal-scale inflation as the years go by.

More posts about: quantified // 4 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/23903

Sehr Kurz

This looks very interesting. Could you provide more details on how you obtained and analyzed this data. What tools, etc.?
All the best
Eugene

Hi Sacha, which virtual assistant service do you use?
- http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua
  
  I interview and hire people through oDesk. That way, I have more control over quality and training, and I still have flexibility in terms of hours.
Alison

Do you pay by the hour or task on odesk? Could you share your job description? Thx!

On This Day...

2012: Sketchnotes: #ENT101 Entrepreneurial Management–Jon E. Worren — This talk is part of the free MaRS Entrepreneurship 101 series (webcast and in-person session every Wednesday). Feel free to [...]
2011: Geek travel update: Mostly as planned — I planned my packing for the Oct 5 – Oct 15 trip to the Philippines using several matrices. Life worked [...]
2010: Thinking about getting better at writing — Photo (c) 2009 Markus Rodder – Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives Licence 2.0 I want to become a more [...]
2009: Happy Bee-Day to me! — I recently celebrated my two-year anniversary with IBM. This is what I posted on my internal blog on October 16, [...]
2006: mencoder rocks for editing movies — I used my Sony Cybershot digital camera to take a video of my presentation at Democamp last night. The file weighed in [...]
2006: Whoops, a little too hasty with the rm there — I accidentally deleted the second half of my workshop recording. Which is a pity, as it turns out you can get [...]
2006: I rock! Mail back online — Stymied by the sudden breakage in my mail setup, I racked my brain for another way to get to the mail [...]
2006: Postfix TLS problems — It looks like my mail authentication has very quietly broken behind the scenes. I’ve been using SSH tunnel to get out [...]
2006: 10 rules for staying young — Via Quinn, who got it from Richard, who got it from Dave Pollard, George Carlin’s 10 rules for Staying Young: Throw [...]
2006: Awww, good karma — You are really becoming an great speaker ;) btw, I was hanging around the back and overheard people asking if you [...]
2006: Not among strangers — It’s amazing, looking out over a crowd of some 70 people and realizing that very few of them are strangers. It [...]
2006: Terrible at remembering names? — Check out this teacher-oriented article What’s Your Name Again? by Mary !McKinney. It starts: ÃƒÂ¢Ã‚Â€Ã‚ÂœIÃƒÂ¢Ã‚Â€Ã‚Â™m terrible at names,ÃƒÂ¢Ã‚Â€Ã‚Â complained my friend [...]
2006: Democamp a blast! Blew their brains to bits — I set out to geek the heck out of Toronto’s hippest geeks, and I did. I showed them Emacs as they’d [...]
2005: Aha! moment — 43 Emacsen — feel free to steal this idea! =) — Feel free to Make This Happen, or get in touch with me if you want to hack on this with a [...]
2005: In the arms of a stranger — On a whim, I decided to drop by the tango class at the International Student Centre. Although I’d never danced the [...]
2005: Getting along with other geeks — It’s so much fun to hang out with other geeks. (Yes, Marcelle, that includes you. ;) ) Diane Gonzales asks: how do [...]
2005: Let other people help — Said by Benjamin Franklin, quoted by Michael Motta, blogged by Seth Godin: “He that has once done you a kindness will [...]
2003: Ack! No keys! — I have no idea where my keys are. Okay, last time I remember them – I was taking them off in [...]
2003: Things to bring for resta nd recreation — Cross-reference: 2003.10.28#1
2003: Equation — -4*c^3*d^2*e^2 - 27*d^4*e^2 + 16*c^4*e^3 + 144*c*d^2*e^3 - 128*c^2*e^4 + 256*e^5 + 16*c^3*d^3*f + 108*d^5*f - 72*c^4*d*e*f - 630*c*d^3*e*f + [...]
2003: Encyclopedia of Stupid Languages at http://www.kraml.at/stupid/ — “You think Perl is hard to read? You think Pascal is restrictive to the point of uselessness? You ainÃ¢Â€Â™t seen nothin [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life