I don’t know about you, but the way I spend money in 2020 has certainly changed. Previously we would have a lot of expenses around dining out, sporting events and travel. In 2020, with a global pandemic that shut the world down, the way we spend our money has changed quite a bit. Mrs. Money and I certainly aren’t driving as much as we once did, we’re not eating out at restaurants that much (although we still do takeout somewhat regularly) and foreign vacations are on hold for the time being. My theory, which was supported by some of my friends, is that COVID in a weird way was helping to save us money. Now of course I do want to extend sympathy to any readers that have lost their job or have been furloughed. Out of curiosity, I’ve been keeping tabs on my money (which ok I realize goes without saying as I’m quite an avid budgeter) to try to get a better sense of a) are we saving more money? and b) how has our spending changed?

The methodology

To start with, I honed in on a few of the main categories that we spend our money in, and started tracking those. As mentioned, COVID has changed the areas we spend in, so I wanted to focus in on the spending that we’re actually doing. The 4 categories I tracked are: groceries, dining out, treats and gas. These are the areas that we’re spending our money on, and I thought it’d be cool follow those specifically.

I’m a bit old-school when it comes to budgets and actually use a good old fashioned spreadsheet. You can actually download the template that I use here on my site. I recently switched over to a Google Sheet (which makes tracking on the go easier). So, my budgeting is a bit more manual than what others might be used to, but honestly it works well for me. The best budget is one that’s going to work for you and that you’ll stick with. Within this budget, I had a separate section where every time I spent in those categories, I kept a running tally of how many times and how much the total was. I did this over a 3-month period to try to get a little bit better of a baseline.

The numbers

Over my 3 month period of tracking, here is what I found us spending. I averaged it out as depending on how many days the month had or what we were doing that month it might have looked a bit different.

Groceries – On average we buy groceries 8 times per month, spending a total of $527 per month. That’s on average twice a week which seems like a lot as I type this out.

Dining Out – On average we eat out 8 times per month, spending a total of $264 per month. That feels about right; meaning we eat out about twice a week, normally dinner Friday or Saturday night along with a lunch thrown in there.

Treats – On average we ‘treat ourselves’ with ice-cream, coffee or other goodies 14 times a month, for a total of $203.

Gas – On average we fill up 8 times per month for a total of $155. That kind feels like a lot to me but I guess with Mrs. Money needing gas once a week and me periodically getting it too they add up!

The observations

First observation I had was “wow we spend a TON on groceries”. Yes BabyMoneyFinance is at the point where we have to buy real food, so at this point we are feeding 3 mouths. Even though we do a really good job of buying stuff on sale, or store brand (not on all things but on things that we feel make sense), and we don’t waste very much food at all, groceries are not cheap! Obviously they’re still WAY cheaper than eating out but I was very amazed at how much we’re spending on groceries. We’ve even switched to doing more online ordering (and picking up at the store in the parking lot), which I would have thought would help us avoid overspending by buying extra stuff! 

As suspected, we aren’t spending that much on gas. Mrs. Money (employed at a school) is back in session (A/B days but still feels weird) so she is driving her normal amount, taking BabyMoneyFinance to daycare and then driving to school. I, on the other hand am still working from home so I’m saving probably 2 tanks of gas myself each month. 

For dining out, what initially started very much as a way to help keep restaurants in business has morphed back into our normal frequency of pre-COVID. We probably do take-out twice a week, sometimes more, but not often less. One of my credit cards has a DashPass membership included, so it’s fairly quick and easy (although not cheaper) to have food show up at our door. Doing take-out will certainly save us money because we’re not ordering alcohol to-go (although the City of Atlanta does allow that during COVID) and we’re never tempted to get dessert or anything. I will call out that’s a little unsettling that over the course of the 3 months we’ve been spending more and more each month on take-out. Even when we went to the beach for a long weekend in October we still made our own meals for breakfast and lunch. That increasing trend is an interesting finding and something for me to keep an eye on!

Finally, treats were decently consistent and thankfully not a huge part of our budget. I’m actually happy to see our spending with ‘treats’ as 2020 has kind of sucked in a lot of ways so it’s nice to celebrate the little things here and there. We’re big fans of donuts and ice-cream and the occasional trip out is always fun. 

The plans

I can’t say I necessarily want to change the way we spend our money moving forward. Thankfully this exercise wasn’t too eye opening in a bad way or anything. Truthfully we run a pretty tight budget to begin with, and are quite disciplined in our spending. It’s not like we can drive less or buy less groceries! So, in summary, a cool exercise for me to track some of our key spending, thankfully nothing shockingly bad and I can be assured that we’re still saving/investing a fair amount so I don’t have to stress or worry too much about our dining out and treats!