Last year I wrote about Grocery Spending by Income Group. Yeah you guessed it, rich people spend more. Today we'll follow that one up with the sequel and look at how much families spend based on family size.
I got the data straight out of the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey . Specifically the numbers below are from the tables for Size of consumer unit.
First family size and spending on monthly basis :
Pretty obviously, bigger families spend more.
But what about the amount spent per person?
There the trend reverses and for larger families they spend less per person. I assume this is due to a couple factors. First I'm assuming that the larger the family the more smaller children and I'd assume smaller children consume less food (usually). So a typical family of 4 with 2 little kids isn't going to eat as much per person as 2 adults would. Second I'd also guess that larger families are better at economizing on their food spending due to necessity. Its one thing to splurge on the steak if you're a single person but buying 5 steaks is going to hit your pocket book a lot harder.
--
Posts
