How much money do you spend on food?

By Joachim Buwembo

Few people in their 20s want to be told to be careful with the way they spend their money.

Of course we all know that once in their 30s, people are already worrying about their future, especially that time when they will no longer be earning the steady income that they are enjoying now.

Even if you remain gainfully employed until the retirement age of 50 years, you could still have children going to school and, God forbid, you could be like some people who do not yet have a house of their own at that age.

Again, it is not easy to explain to some youngish people that the surest way to save money for future investment is to minimise your expenditure. Some, actually most, have learnt in basic economics that profi ts are maximised by minimising costs.

But like it happens with our education system, the products rarely relate what they are taught to real life. So someone can score highly in economics and yet they do not strive to minimise their costs, but somehow hope for some magic to avail investable funds at some date when they will need them.

So let us just mention here, so that we are not blamed for not telling/reminding you, that you must keep examining your costs to see if you are spending little enough to enable you save meaningfully for the future.

FOOD, SHELTER, CLOTHING are the three basic necessities which you must provide for, even if your income is zero. What we shall be looking at in three episodes is how the expense on these can be safely minimised so that you can increase your savings for investment in the not-too-distant future.

Today we want to look at food. How much should you spend on food? It depends on what the purpose of food is to your life. If your purpose of eating is to be seen eating in certain places, or what other people see you eating, then you can stop reading here, for you are not the right audience for this article.

But if you eat in order to be healthy and strong so as to carry out your duties and fulfil your ambitions, then read on. The fact that you can read and understand this article implies that you know what a balanced diet is, or are able to use google to fi nd out in case you have forgotten what you were taught in school.

So we shall skip that. Instead, I will start by telling you a real story or situation that several of us witnessed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I worked at one of the most successful companies in Kampala.

Of the few hundred thousand employees, it was the CEO/MD who used to eat the LEAST EXPENSIVE lunch. He was by far the best paid person. He used to drive only brand new cars - not recons like the rest of us senior offi cers and he used to go for annual holidays abroad with his family.

He also had another big company - his own - in Kampala, and was also busy investing in Nairobi where now he runs two big media companies. So his eating the least expensive lunch does not in any way mean he was living the least expensive life. Nor was he malnourished for he was quite healthy and stronger than most staff even though he was older, and he used to jog several kilometres a day.

From a survey I just conducted at today's current crazy market prices in Kampala, you need to spend NOT MORE than sh100,000 per month on good food, laundry and body care. But as we said before, you can spend more if your purpose for eating is to be seen eating certain menus.

So if you are to spend sh100,000 on a balanced diet, soaps and deodorants in a month, then you have no business of spending more than 10% of a sh1,000,000 salary on them. At that level, you can still spend sh100,000 to and from work in a 22-working days per month.

Presumably you are working in the city or a town to where you commute daily. One tip you need is that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A careful investment in breakfast materials will see you spending sh1,000 or less per breakfast in your home.

You hardly need any lunch if you have had a good breakfast and the next meal can still be had at home. Again if you think this ‘ain't cool' then you need to think hard to establish why you need to eat. At your level, we assume you do not do things without knowing why you do them.