Hunting Happiness

It is hard to read or listen to any news without gloomy proclamations that prices are spiraling out of control on essential items like gas and groceries. Stories abound telling of families unable to buy sufficient groceries, or having to cut back hugely on driving.

Rather than look at prices for essentials, I thought it would be interesting to look at our monthly spend on such items. So I made a custom report in the ever-handy Quicken to compare our actual spend on gas and groceries for the past 30 days versus the previous twelve 30-day periods. I wasn’t sure what to expect but the results are telling. Our average over the past 12 months is $580.15. In the past 30 days it was $588.01, a virtual tie. I recently posted that SomeGal and I are not really feeling any effects of the possible recession we are in. The graph below backs this up. We have certainly not actively attempted to spend less on groceries or do less driving. So either prices have not really gone up that much, or we have subliminally cut back, or some other unrelated trend has caused us to drive and eat less. I originally was going to include the dining out category because it is conceivable that we have recently eaten out more and therefore bought fewer groceries. Unfortunately I could not include it because the dining category varies wildly from month to month due to normal activity and things like treating family for holidays or birthdays and rewarding employees. I also do not change the allocation of dining out when we are on vacation (where it tends to spike, obviously).