How much should your food budget be?

Working out a food budget for your family is going to depend upon a lot of things. You need to consider your family's lifestyle choices as well as preferences, and take into account the individual tastes of every member of your family.

It's not such a difficult task but you need to work your way through them in an orderly fashion.

Working out your food budget is a personal thing based upon your taste and budget.

Your family has its favourite foods that you should plan to include, but the trick is to plan your menu carefully and save money when buying your shopping.

Here are some tips so you can work out how much it should be.

• To get a gauge on what you currently spend on food means you will have to make a detailed list of your food purchases over a 30 day period. Keep all of your receipts and write everything down from snacks to restaurant bills. Good budget preparation will mean you have recorded everything, so it will be an easy task to single out the food items and tally them up in a separate list.
• After you have an accurate idea of exactly how much you are spending on food every month, ask yourself whether it is worth spending that amount of money or not. If you are happy with the way things are, your job is finished, but if not it's time to work out a better plan.

• Don't assume that preparing a food budget means that baked beans on toast is going to become the family favourite. There are plenty of ways you can get inventive with food so don't let food choices be a problem. Simply make a list of what every member of the family likes to eat but don't forget that it is also important to try to provide healthy options and introduce new foods, textures and flavours to your family's diet.
• One of the best ways to do this is to look at the favourite food items and work out which ones are 'needs' and which ones are 'desires'. For example, you might consider fruit and vegetables to be needs, whereas ice cream is a desire.
• Another way to cut back on cooking costs is to come up with some alternatives. If you scour some old recipe books, especially those written in the 1940s and 50s, you will be surprised at what you might find. In those days women became extremely inventive out of necessity and you can learn a lot from them too.
• Of course, you don't have to exclude treats altogether. There are many cheaper alternatives and it just takes a bit of time and exploration to find them. Clever cooks are the ones that can make a simple food delicious and a little bit of Web surfing will quickly uncover some hidden gems for your table.

How much should your food budget be now? As you can see there is no easy answer to this but if you start exploring your choices you will amaze yourself at how much you can reduce your budget by.