I spend more on food down here, food of same or similar quality/brand is more expensive here than at similar-quality stores back home. For me that would be Publix vs. Big Y, and Fresh Market vs. CT Natural Foods and Produce. Big Y is the "expensive" grocery store back home, and where I used to do most of my shopping. Now, I have to get most of my stuff from Walmart, which I avoided in the north.
We order take-out often here, but that's not much different from how we lived back home. Fast food dinners, sometimes pizza, sometimes subs, sometimes Outback, sometimes prepared "re-heat and serve) stuff from the produce store (they had a catering business too, you could get chicken piccata over rigatoni, home-made in their own kitchen and sold by the ounce - really delicious stuff).
I cooked as well, but ground meat here is insanely expensive. Thankfully I learned that Fresh Market has ground chuck for $2.99/lb on Tuesdays, so I stock up every so often and we have meatloaf or mac & meatballs one night, with enough leftovers to last for lunches for the whole week.
I like being somewhat conservative in my grocery spending but I am not what anyone would consider "frugal."
Re: paper goods: we don't use paper or plastic plates, and I wash and re-use chinese takeout soup containers and take-out containers from Carabba's as well. So I never spend anything on that stuff.
TP and paper towels I still have some from when we moved in November 2019. I had rewards bucks from Staples and used them to stock up a couple times a year, even though we never ran low. So I had around 200 rolls of toilet paper at the start of the pandemic, and around 50 rolls of paper towels. We still have some left, but we're down to our last dozen TP rolls so I started buying again. Up until recently, the last time I paid out of pocket for either was maybe 2014.
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