Vanguard talks about this in terms of “return of sound money” in their 2024 outlook: https://advisors.vanguard.com/insights/article/vanguards-eco...

I feel like it's grocery prices..

We are a family of 6. Our grocery budget is consistently between $2500-$3000 a month.

We shop at Aldi.

Can you explain this to me in even a rough estimate?

My family of 4 spends $900 a month, and we do NOT price shop. I live in the metroplitan area of a major city, do NOT shop at discount stores, and even have higher meat bills due to religious reasons. We waste very little, I should add, and buy almost all name brand goods.

There are vast differences in how much people eat. Males between 12-25 tend to eat a lot more than girls - hormones mean they can burn a lot of calories without gaining weight - and they are also more likely to be in activities that use a lot of energy (I don't know why this is, but it seems to be the case) Babies of course eat very little.

I can believe both numbers just based on normal genetic variation.

I expect my food bill to go up around 50% once my boys hit their teens, but still, that only puts me at around half the monthly spend of OP

Where are you at? My family of 6 usually spends on the order of 1000$ a month for local grass-fed meat and groceries at Costco

Per year? Thats pretty reasonable I'd say.

A month.

Thats stupid insanely high and hilariously out of line w/ normal consumption

Choosing a very high COL area (Westchester), the expected food costs for a family of 6 is 1.7k according to the EPI

Buying fresh everything?

Real food? Not 100 boxes of Hamburger Helper with a shelf life of 6 years for $100.

Yes, fresh food in bulk is cheaper than hamburger helper. I lived on $190 a month on veggies and eggs when I was poor as hell in 2015. I just bought everything in bulk.

While I suspect that your budget could probably be tightened up a bit, I have to say that I'm ever glad I never wanted to have children - just keeping my own ass housed, fed, and health-insured (important for someone with a bit of disability) takes about everything I got.

There was another story here this morning that got some discussion about how people are omitting children as a way of finding work-life balance; who can blame them?

edit: other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39259093

Could you link the story? - e: looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39259093

A week? Seems high.

It's high for shopping at Aldi...

But as an individual I'm probably spending 500-600/mo between Publix and Food Lion...so it kind of tracks.

Only if we return to higher rates of interest fr a long period. Here in the UK the desire seems to be to return inflation and interest rates to approx 2%. Rates of 2% and inflation of 2% means there is little incentive to save.

How are they going to control both at the same time. Govt underwriting high risk retail loans, quantitative tightening?

The theory is that high interest rates will bring inflation down - once they are down the market is already predicting that rates will drop to 2% - so the era of cheap money will continue...

It seems to be working, but no better here than it is on the continent and USA, where inflation is already lower.