How to calculate monthly food expenses for family using spreadsheets and simple formulas?

Question

I want to manage my family budget more effectively and am thinking of applying some basic mathematical formulas to estimate monthly food costs. Specifically, I need:

1. How to set up a simple spreadsheet (Excel/Google Sheets).
2. The formulas for calculating total expenses are based on:
3. Number of family members
4. Average consumption (meals/week)
5. Food prices change over time

If anyone has experience with this type of budgeting or has a sample file, please share instructions to help me apply the math to this real-life problem!

Thank you!

Answer 1

A simple Excel spreadsheet can be set up by inserting your data into 3 columns. In your example,

1. Column A, Row 1 can be titled "Number of family members"
2. Column B, Row 1 can be titled "Average consumption (meals/week)"
3. Column C, Row 1 can be titled "Food prices change over time"

In Column A, starting with Row 2, enter the possible number of family members who will be eating, from 1-9.

In Column B, starting with Row 2, you can enter the number of meals per week that need to be prepared per person, from 1-28.

In Column C, starting with Row 2, you can enter the average price of each meal from $5 to $25.

With this set up, you can then write a simple formula to calculate the cost of 1 week of meals for the given number of family members and their average consumption.

In this example, we will assume 5 family members consumed an average of 14 meals per week at $8 per meal. Therefore, we can insert the formula, " =A6*B9*C5 " to get a total cost for that week.

After entering the formula, the spreadsheet will automatically calculate the cost to be $560.