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.