I ran eighteen months of credit card transactions through a spending analysis yesterday. Jan 2025 through July 2026, exported, cleaned, reclassified. Klaus, my AI agent, helped me sort through most of it in one session.
The food numbers were what I wanted to understand.
Restaurants came out on top. Fast food, the drive-through and window kind, was close behind. Groceries were a distant third at 10% of my food spend.
21 meals a week means only two are made at home. Or so you might think. The reality is that the 10% is mostly drinks and snacks. It’s closer to about one home cooked meal a week.
The easy explanation for that is “we’re busy people.” My wife and I work full days. Going somewhere is easier than cooking. That’s the general shape of it.
The data was more specific. Restaurants came in higher than fast food. If it were really just exhaustion driving the eating out, fast food would be the bigger number. We’re going somewhere and sitting down more often than grabbing something on the way home. That puts a different frame on the grocery line.
The grocery line is low because we skip the kitchen, and we skip the kitchen for a specific reason. Dinner ends and the cleanup remains. Meal finished. Sink full. That’s where we drop out of the loop, every time, same break in the same place.
“We’re busy” covers it loosely. “The cleanup after dinner is where we break” is something you can actually work with. Specific enough to solve, if we decided to. A different setup that produces fewer dishes, or just keeping the restaurant habit with a real reason behind it now.
So what?
Are we going to change our dining habits. Not likely. Even though we could cut our spending in half. So long as our income can support it, this is one of the areas where we choose to treat ourself. No cleaning, everyone gets exactly what they want to eat, and it is cooked better than I generally could.
I’m just periodically checking in to make sure I understanding the numbers.