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<p>Yes, if good options exist. But if you have to choose between being within walking distance of your campus and being within walking distance of a supermarket, the campus is going to win every time.</p>
<p>I have two daughters in grad school. They eat healthfully; each likes to cook. They find that time is at least as much an issue as money. They’re often coming home from class or the library around 8 PM, and who wants to cook then? </p>
<p>Lots of good ideas here for budgeting money. What my kids do to save time: one got a small slow cooker and starts a soup or something similar in the morning, then has leftovers for a few days. One tries to cook 4 servings on a Sunday, and has leftovers throughout the week. They LOVE gift cards from Panera, Chipotle, even Subway. Lunch is a yogurt and a Clif bar every single day. They have become much more appreciative of my home cooking. :)</p>
<p>In addition to the grocery $$$, buy her a crockpot - my daughter learned the value and convenience of coming home after a busy day to a meal already ready to eat (as mentioned above, sometimes not till 8pm!) My daughter uses hers to make salsa chicken, buffalo chicken, chicken pot pie type thingy - chicken a million ways!!! And usually some leftovers to boot.</p>
<p>It also depends where you shop. I can go to giant and spend eighty dollars on groceries and get the same ones elsewhere for 60. Usually if I’m getting fresh things i go to wegmans… They also have the best priced bread…but if I’m buying canned or frozen things I’ll go to renders. That being said, these same groceries in say new York would probably cost fifty to a hundred percent more. The only time i go to giant is if I’m cooking and run out of something. They are too expensive.</p>
<p>Its really not hard at all to eat for two hundred a month. I’ve never once eaten ramen. Tasted my sisters once and practically spit it out.</p>
<p>Also, buy things on sale. I have a pantry full of canned items that I’ve picked up from time to time. The other day i wanted to make a lentil soup and all i had to do was go buy the Carrrots, zucchini, onion and celery because i had everything else. I made five quarts. Now I’m going to make a chicken pot pie and another type of soup with the remainder of that celery and carrots and freeze it so none goes to waste. </p>
<p>Please keep in mind that the first few shopping trips till the standard every day items are bought will be more expensive… Butter, flour, sugar, salt, etc. that’s initial cost that won’t need to be repeated every shopping trip.</p>
<p>Sent from my DROID BIONIC using CC</p>
<p>I’m in Tampa, Fl. $200/mo. for first person, and $150/mo. for each additional person in household is adequate to buy sufficient groceries unless you’re eating steaks every night. If I ate $120/week of groceries, after a couple of months I wouldn’t be able to fit through the grocery store door.</p>
<p>For a college student what is most important is that the student eat regularily, eat healthy meals, and not skip meals…eating one meal each day at the college’s dining hall is often a smart way to be sure student is eating enough. Students are not always good cooks, they avoid cooking to save time and to not have to clean up kitchen, etc…all of which can lead to student getting run down from not eating properly. The student’s engine needs healthy food for them to stay strong during school term.</p>
<p>$200 monthly works out perfectly, and to whoever said 2.80 per meal, yes, but you have to take into account MAKING food is cheaper, and honestly it depends on your eating habits, but for my friends, they’re sisters living in an apartment and they get by fine on $200 a month for groceries/toiletries for BOTH of them :)</p>
<p>“Unless there’s a supermarket on the path where your student walks every day when going to and from class, this means having a car.”</p>
<p>Unless you’re in the city with a good grocery delivery system. I used Peapod when I was in law school in the Boston area, where having a car would have been impossible. The delivery fees are a fraction of what it would cost to buy food on campus or at the small specialty shops I passed daily. I don’t know how many cities have these, but it’s a great option in Boston and Chicago. Sometimes the prices are even better than in the local supermarket.</p>
<p>Unfortunately that option seems to be pretty limited, even middle sized cities may not have grocery delivery & grocery stores not that accessible even by bus.
Peapod is limited to a few areas on east coast.
Amazon delivers to a few areas, but of course not to Ds region.</p>
<p>I live alone, eat vegetarian, and shop for groceries exclusively at Trader Joes. I buy the same stuff every week, give or take a few items, and my bill runs $38-$48 a week. I eat healthily, and rarely buy anything that would be considered “junk” food. This includes salad fixings for my lunch 3x a week.</p>
<p>Some of food budgeting is knowing how to repurpose packaged items, like jar pasta sauce, or even a pre-packaged frozen mac & cheese, by adding a slew of fresh veggies into it. My D watched me cook like this and now she’s pretty adept at “playing with her food”.</p>
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No - that’s what only some kids do on an urban campus - the ones with the discretionary money to spend. There’s no reason she couldn’t buy groceries at Whole Foods or elsewhere and cook it herself if she’s in an apartment.</p>
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That’s what part time jobs are for - for the student to earn their own pizza and beer money. I don’t see why a parent should feel obliged to pay for such luxury.</p>
<p>We send out kids the cost of a full meal plan … if they pick a lesser meal plan they get the difference to spend on food (and likely have some bucks laft over for other things).</p>
<p>Every family I expect has to identify what they can afford to financially support.</p>
<p>We’ve determined how much to give our D for meals & personal needs, and if she wants to budget her expenditures so that she can afford to go out for pizza & beer, I’m not going to argue about her choices.
I wish I had went out for pizza & beer more when I was her age. :)</p>
<p>I don’t really shop (that’s my husband’s domain), so I’m not the greatest person to know about this stuff. I am extremely shopping-challenged.</p>
<p>Your D’s at the University of Delaware, right? Well, here is a link to the UD website for student Wellness and Health. There are lots of questions that are in the general area of what you want to know AND the director lists her phone number and invites calls. </p>
<p>I imagine she would have an idea on a food budget amount.</p>
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<p>[Student</a> Wellness & Health Promotion](<a href=“http://www.udel.edu/studentwellness/nutrition.html]Student”>Student Wellbeing | Division of Student Life | University of Delaware)</p>
<p>My D is in NYC for college and is a vegetarian and shops at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods and she doesn’t spend more than $50 on food.</p>
<p>I live in DC and spend generally around $50/week on groceries and $20/week on ‘extras’–lunch out with a coworker, coffee run at work, or dinner out on the weekends. I could afford to spend more, but I really just don’t eat that much :)</p>
<p>I try to make something one day that I can ‘repurpose’ the next day, as I hate straight leftovers. Plus after working 8-10 hours, I get sick of coming home to cook. So if one day I make chicken + pasta for dinner, I’ll either save leftover pasta or a cook an extra piece of chicken for the next day. That way I only have to either provide a protein or a carb, not both. I’m not the best ‘from scratch’ cook, as I’m big on things like Pasta Roni, jarred pasta sauces, rice mixes, and stuff like that. </p>
<p>I do recommend buying things like frozen chicken breasts, granola bars, laundry detergent/paper products at Costco or Sam’s. Definitely a better buy</p>
<p>It’s amazing though when you go shopping for random things and then get the bill and wonder what you spent it on because you bought small amounts of food! I had a small list the other day and it had stuff like toilet paper, tissues, plastic spoons, shampoo, razor blades, etc… Plus a few food items. The total bill was like sixty dollars and as i was putting the food away i was thinking gee i barely got any meals out of this! Thankfully i buy the giant packs of that stuff so i don’t gave to replace it very often… But when it all runs out at once i cringe!</p>
<p>Sent from my DROID BIONIC using CC</p>
<p>When I was in college in the early 1980s, I chipped in with roommates for food. Our grocery bill each semester per was only about 30% of dining hall costs.</p>
<p>If she is cooking most meals now and not really using the meal plan, how much is she spending now?</p>
<p>I’d sit down with her and talk about what kinds of meals she enjoys. Make a mock weekly menu, list the ingredients she’ll need to make those and figure out how much those cost. </p>
<p>Because I have 50-50 custody, I eat on a budget for one every other week. I freeze a lot of things in individual portions to prevent waste. I am a meat eater, but it is easy to make a pound of ground turkey into taco meat and split it into 4 containers. It is easy to make a pot of chili or soup and freeze it. It is easy to make things like lasagna or meatballs and freeze them. Ditto with chicken parmigiana. If she does eat meat, I’d suggest investing in good storage containers that can go from freezer to microwave. If she finds she is throwing out things like milk because it spoils before she can use it, maybe she could split a container with a roommate. </p>
<p>Even when I have my kids, I do all my main cooking on Sunday. Meatballs, a meatloaf, chicken, porkchops, taco meat, etc. Then I can warm it up and cook some sides quickly when I get home from work. I don’t have to think about “What are we going to have for dinner?” I’ve been doing this for years now because when I got home at 5:30 and we had to leave at 6:15 for kids activities, we ended “driving thru” which was too unhealthy and expensive. Once the kids were older, I could call them and say “Put the sauce and meatballs on the stove” and then, as I got close to home “Start boiling the water for the pasta”. It has been a budget and time saver. And you can make a lot of things simultaneously. It takes me about an hour to do my Sunday cooking. Sometimes, while things are all cooking, I chop up veggies so they are ready to just toss in the water during the week. I cut up fruit into individual portions.</p>
<p>I spend about $400/month, including toiletries, over the counter meds, paper goods. And that’s for 2-3 people. My grocery bill didn’t go down a lot when my D left. I have leftovers more often for lunches though.</p>
<p>We’re analyzing the same thing at our house, for a different reason. My daughter pays for everything. We were just helping her budget and trying to select an apartment taking finances into consideration. I excluded restaurants from the equation, calling it a wash. She eats out NOW, while having a meal plan. We just agreed she’d eat out the same amount. We came up with $50 week too, sans restaurants.</p>