The price of eggs

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Way back in 2012, I finally got tired of playing guessing games with the family finances and started keeping a budget — like a real one, on an Excel spreadsheet with itemized monthly expenses and income and such.

My wife and I got married in 1993, just to give you an idea of how long we just kind of willy-nilly took care of paying bills and knowing how much money we had to spend each month, which I do not recommend, like, at all.

Of course, it’s great knowing how much money you have in the bank and how much you’re going to have to spend between now and the next pay day and all that, but it’s also kind of depressing when you have to make changes to the expense column, like every single year when I have to add somewhere between a hundred to two hundred bucks to the health insur-

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ance. Although there is some satisfaction to be had from paying off a car note or the bill for the new furniture (that is far from “new” looking by the time those “easy monthly installments” are done).

But by far, the most frustrating thing over the years has been the monthly “food” column. Back in 2021, I calculated and budgeted $25 a day for food, comingx in at about $750 a month. Now, if you’re thinking that doesn’t seem like much, just think about how you can buy things like ground beef and chicken in bulk and look for stuff on sale, which I know isn’t for everyone, but it beats eating out every meal and then going, “Where did all our money go?”

But yeah, it wasn’t too long before I had to bump that up to $30 a day ($900 a month) and then $40 ($1,200 a month), even as our kids started growing up and leaving home. And that’s because everything — and I do mean everything — has just gone up and up in price.

We used to have quick and easy “cheap” meals, like spaghetti or burgers and fries that might set us back $15 or so to feed our family of five.

Now it’s hard to gat the ingredients for those same meals for under $30.

So, now that it’s just my wife and I living at home, I don’t really have a set “per day” target, but I still keep an eye on the rising cost of, again, everything.

Right now, the price of eggs is a hot topic on the news. And for good reason. There’s a reason the phrase “a dime a dozen” was coined back in the day. Eggs used to be super cheap. Well, if things keep going the way they are, a more appropriate saying will be “a dime a dozen… dollars.”