In case you can’t tell by now, it basically is my life’s goal to be able to leave any job any time I no longer want to be doing it. Yeah, I guess people call it financial independence. As such, I frequently consume content about how people achieve such similar goals.

Many of these blogs/videos/whatever all preach saving money by NOT EATING OUT. That said, most of this content comes from people who are living in a world without Hawker Centers (countries where perhaps eating out would cost a lot more than what is readily available here in sunny Singapore. Curiosity about how much one would actually save coupled with off-handed comments by random people about how “oh for two people it probably is cheapert to just dabao (take away food)” led me down a path of tracking our food expenditure for an entire month way back in July 2019. (Yes, including how much the husband’s morning teh (he is not yet waging his war against diabetes) costs every morning. And Yes, ever the good academic, I left my data to sit for a bit before working on it.)

Data Collection

This was purely an observational exercise though I felt like there was some serious Hawthorne Effect going on. We tried our best to go about our usual business and were not particularly frugal nor did we celebrate any special occasions which might have been a little more expensive than “the usual”.

We recorded the cost of everything we ingested, including drinks. This did not include water which we drank at home and/or work. Whilst we did not set out to avoid drinking alcohol but on review, we did not pay for any alcohol during the period of data collection.

The Husband usually has a pretty regular eating schedule of between three to four meals a day, whereas I often went without breakfast. Most, though not all, meals were had in some hawker center or coffee shop of sorts. I had set out to do this just for a week, but it went on for another and then some.

Results

I no longer remember what happened on 2 Aug 2019 (shoddy, I know)– someone might have bought us a meal that day or we might have forgotten to record our spending for the day. Either way, omitting that as an outlier, we spent between S$12 and S$71.55 per day on food for the both of us. On average, we spent S$34 per day, which would work out to S$1020 per month.

Discussion

So the initial plan was to compare this with the cost of not eating out at all. However, that has been proving challenging to execute. As such, I have decided to look at the next best thing… other people’s data!

Based on data from the Department of Statistics‘s Household Expenditure Survey, the average monthly household expenditure on food and food serving services (meals bought from restaurants, hawker centres, food courts, etc) was S$1199 in 2017/18. Henceforth, “Food” would refer to food and food serving services.

Looking at the above information, we can come to a few conclusions.

Food Expenditure “Per Capita”

First, despite eating out entirely, our would-be monthly expenditure on food is pretty in line (slightly less) than the country’s Average Monthly Household Expenditure on Food and Food Serving Services. However, we are a tiny household of two, whereas the average household size in Singapore is in the ballpark of 3.24. Taking that into account, the Average Monthly Household Expenditure on “Food” per capita works out to S$370. Our projected per capita spending is S$520 which does seem… significantly higher than the national average.

Everybody Eats Out (At Least Partially!)

It does seem like our country has settled into an equilibrium where we all spend significantly more eating out than we do at home. This could be because eating out costs more than eating at home, but it could also be because we do eat out a fair bit in Singapore.

Based on my own experience, there seems to be a few factors which affect whether or not we eat out. These include the availability of relatively affordable food, and the fact that there are so many other things competing for our time and attention that “cooking” just does not seem to make it up the priority list.

I could probably write an entire other post about the challenges of cooking, and my own journey into the kitchen but that has to be another story for another day.

To Close

This exercise has undoubtedly given me great insight into our own spending habits on food. It has also been fascinating to look at the expenditure data that the heroes at Singstat have put out. Maybe at some point I will be able to execute my own little exercise of cooking at home for a week and give you all an update on how it compares. Also, if there is anybody reading this who wants to comment on how this is different from your own experience, I would be happy to hear!

In the meanwhile, keep eating! See you all in (less than) three months!