In 2006, we spent $33 on snacks for the entire year. Thirty-three dollars. For two adults. I’m not bragging — I’m just saying that when you’re watching every dollar in the early years of a marriage, “let’s grab something” isn’t really a thing that happens. If we wanted ice cream, we bought a store-brand container from the grocery store and called it a treat.

Last year, we spent $1,011.

I want to be clear: I have never once looked at our snack spending until writing this post. Not deliberately, not casually, not ever. This is the category I’ve always considered budget noise — the random gas station stop, the occasional ice cream run, the Starbucks that just kind of happens. It adds up, I assumed, but not in a way that really matters. Twenty years of data later, I’m here to report that I was both right and wrong about that.

The Frugal Years

For the first few years of our marriage, this category barely existed. We were frugal in a way that’s hard to fully describe to our current selves — not coupon-clipping frugal, just quietly disciplined. We didn’t spend on things we didn’t need. Snacks qualified as things we didn’t need. Treats came from the grocery store, not from a drive-through window or a gas station pit stop.

The number started climbing around 2009 — the same year we bought our first house, and, not coincidentally, the same year I started tracking a “Coffee or Soda” subcategory in Quicken. A house felt different from renting. We had a little more breathing room. A coffee run started to feel less like a luxury and more like a Tuesday.

The Part Where My Son Discovers Gas Stations

Today, our snack spending is largely orchestrated by a 9-year-old boy who cannot pass a gas station without requesting an icee. This is not an exaggeration. It is simply a fact of our life. My daughter has equally strong opinions about ice cream. I am not entirely without blame here either.

What I find genuinely funny is that I have never thought of this as spending. It just happens. Nobody wakes up and announces that tonight is ice cream night. It emerges organically, usually from the backseat of the car, and by the time we’re turning into the parking lot it feels less like a decision and more like gravity.

You can actually see the kids arrive in the data. In 2014 — the year our first was born — snack spending jumped from $282 to $604. Some of that was probably just having a baby in the house. Some of it was the two of us taking more walks to get treats with a stroller. Whatever the cause, the number doubled and never came back down.

The Coffee Chapter

The most interesting thing hiding in our snack data is actually a coffee story, and it has a few distinct chapters.

Through most of our early years, coffee barely registered. I drank it, but not as a habit that cost money. That changed gradually as life got busier — by 2019, we were spending $392 a year just on coffee shop runs. Not outrageous, but real. I was never a die-hard Starbucks person; it was mostly convenience, especially with a commute. When it was nearby, I stopped. When it wasn’t, I didn’t.

You can actually see my 2013 pregnancy in the data. That year, coffee spending collapsed from $267 down to $64 — because I cut my consumption way down while pregnant. Then I stopped working outside the home in early 2014, which eliminated the commute coffee run entirely. Then we moved in 2018 to a house with a Starbucks a very convenient distance away, and the line ticks right back up. The data is basically a map of my life circumstances.

In December 2020, we bought an espresso machine. My husband started roasting green coffee beans the following month. Suddenly we had genuinely great coffee at home, exactly the way we like it, without leaving the house. My Starbucks visits dropped to almost nothing.

Here’s what’s easy to miss though: the coffee money didn’t disappear. It migrated. Once my husband started roasting, that spending shifted to a hobbies category — green beans, supplies — and at its peak in 2021, we were spending nearly $1,000 a year there. As his roasting has slowed more recently, I buy fresh beans at the grocery store, which means the spending now lives inside our grocery total and is completely invisible to this analysis. The coffee didn’t get cheaper. It just got harder to track.

The Number That Puts It in Perspective

Here’s the thing about snack spending: even after tripling over 20 years, it has always been remarkably proportional to our overall grocery bill. Across every year of data, we’ve spent roughly 7 cents on snacks for every dollar we spend at the grocery store. In good years and lean years, in the tight early years and the more comfortable recent ones, that ratio has barely moved. It’s never cracked 11 cents on the dollar.

Which means that even though the dollar amount grew from $33 to $1,011, it didn’t actually outrun the rest of our food spending. Inflation, bigger household, busier life — snacks just kept pace. For a category I’ve always called budget noise, it behaves exactly like budget noise: proportional, consistent, boring. The chaos is all in the subcategories.

Does $1,000 a year on snacks bother me? Honestly, no. What surprises me is how small it was at the start. That $33 year — two people, newly married, watching every dollar, eating store-brand ice cream out of the container — that sounds like a perfectly good life. We just have better ice cream now. And an espresso machine. And a son who knows exactly where every gas station icee machine within a 10-mile radius is located.

Some things are worth the money.