talk about putting your money where your mouth is… the latest budget raising eyebrows on reddit comes from a new york city married couple earning 170066 after taxes their gross income amounts to 310042 the original poster says his wife is a data analyst at a big tech company “think google netflix facebook” he teases while he works as a political consultant they’re both 30 and they don’t have kids or a car so where does most of their money go after sinking 88318 into their condo which includes the mortgage insurance property taxes and utilities the couple’s sankey diagram charting their 2021 cash flow claims that “food” took a 29607 bite out of their budget last year this includes 19071 for restaurants 7936 for groceries and 2600 for “home chef” which likely refers to the mealkit delivery service they also spent 17500 on travel according to the chart and they put 16526 into savings check it out on the original post but many people in the almost 7000 comments posted within 24 hours were struck by the food budget a lot of them wrote something along the lines of how this couple is chewing up more money than many readers earn in an entire year “your food budget is my salary guys” wrote the most upvoted comment “your food and travel budgets is sic my annual income” added another who also added a sadface emoji for emphasis indeed the social security administration put the average us annual wage last year at 53383 and the median wage at 34612 most americans do not in fact earn over six figures as a misguided class of wharton students thought now americans across the country have been spending more and more money on food obviously high inflation caused grocery prices to jump 65 in 2021 marking the biggest increase in 13 years so traditional staples such as beef pork chicken dairy eggs sugar and coffee are all costing americans a lot more now when they go to the grocery store everyone’s food bill has gone up related high inflation is eating up the budgets of american households and these high food prices can also be passed on to customers when they order takeout or dine in restaurants before the pandemic many people were going to restaurants or ordering takeout more often food and drink sales in the us restaurant industry had steadily increased in the decade leading up to 2019 and reached over 773 billion in 2019 according to statista and the average us household was spending 3526 on food away from home in 2019 those numbers took a dip in 2020 as the covid19 pandemic forced many businesses to temporarily close while people sheltered in place to slow the spread of the virus but as the country has reopened and more people have gotten vaccinated against the virus people are going back out again americans spent 231 more at restaurants and takeout places in january 2021 than they did at the beginning of the pandemic in april 2020 according to a lendingtree analysis of census bureau data “the data suggests that americans are reaching into their wallets to treat themselves and support local businesses about a year into the pandemic” the report said so this nyc couple trending on reddit isn’t alone in their desire to dine out even if they are spending more than five times what the average household was dropping on this in 2019 in fact several analysts recently told the wall street journal that they expect consumers to have a bigger appetite for dining travel and other services this year and pivot away from buying products as they did in the earlier stockpiling phases of the pandemic several readers noted in the reddit thread that since this couple isn’t spending thousands of dollars on child care gas or car payments instead taking advantage of nyc’s subway system then they have the extra cash to put toward restaurants … and the 6084 marked for spin classes and brazilian jiu jitsu or the 1350 spent on books and then there’s the 5600 for political contributions “they have no kids” wrote one commenter this person mused that if the couple did have children then “all that savings spin class political contributions go bye bye and are replaced with ‘daycare” indeed the average cost of raising a child to age 18 was 233610 or about 12980 per year as of 2015 which was the us department of agriculture’s most recent “cost of raising a child” report and the cost of child care has certainly risen since then a july 2021 center for american progress report found that “families with infants would need to pay nearly 16000 per year on average to cover the true cost of child care” the original poster also explained that he didn’t list miscellaneous expenditures because the pair prioritizes spending their disposable income on going out “we also have an agreement to save anything we can for eating out at new restaurants and for travel which both give us a lot of joy” he wrote in the comments “and in our defense we live right next to some really good restaurants” he added this popular post brings to mind previous viral budget charts on reddit take the seattle couple who raised eyebrows for giving 13000 a year to a church and putting just 3000 into savings and this one that claims to show how a 350000 salary barely qualifies as middle class