I tracked how much I spent on groceries before and after going plant-based and the difference was embarrassing

Old habits die hard. Even after leaving finance, I still track everything. My running mileage, my meditation streaks, my sleep patterns. So when I went vegan at 35, it was almost automatic that I started saving every grocery receipt in a folder on my desk.

What I didn't expect was that those crumpled slips of paper would eventually tell a story that made me question everything I'd assumed about the cost of eating plants.

For years, I'd heard the same refrain from skeptical colleagues and well-meaning family members: "Isn't being vegan expensive?" I'd shrug and say something vague about it balancing out. But I'd never actually done the math.

After five years of receipts, I finally sat down with a spreadsheet and the results genuinely made me cringe at how wrong I'd been, not about veganism being costly, but about how much money I'd been wasting before I made the switch.

The numbers I didn't want to see

Let me be clear about my methodology, because the analyst in me can't help it.

I compared my average monthly grocery spending from the two years before going vegan to my spending over the past three years. Same store, same neighborhood, same household of two adults. The only major variable was what went into the cart.

Before veganism, Marcus and I spent an average of $847 per month on groceries. After? $612. That's a 28% reduction, or roughly $2,820 saved annually. When I first calculated this, I actually re-checked my numbers three times because I was convinced I'd made an error somewhere.

The embarrassing part wasn't the savings themselves. It was realizing how much I'd been spending on things I barely thought about: premium cuts of meat, fancy cheeses that would go moldy before we finished them, deli items grabbed on impulse. I'd been hemorrhaging money without even noticing.

Where the money actually goes now

Here's what shifted. The bulk of our grocery budget now goes toward produce, grains, and legumes. A pound of dried lentils costs around $2 and provides protein for multiple meals. Compare that to the $12-15 I used to spend on a single pound of grass-fed beef that would stretch to maybe two dinners.

Research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health confirms what my receipts showed: plant-based proteins are significantly more affordable than animal proteins when you compare cost per gram of protein. Beans, tofu, and tempeh consistently come out ahead.

Yes, I still buy some specialty items. Good olive oil, nutritional yeast, the occasional fancy plant milk. But these don't come close to offsetting what I used to spend on animal products. Not even close.

The hidden costs I stopped paying

What my spreadsheet couldn't fully capture were the indirect savings. I used to throw away so much food. Chicken breasts that sat in the fridge a day too long. Yogurt that expired before I remembered it existed. Cheese that developed suspicious spots.

Plant foods, especially pantry staples, have longer shelf lives and more forgiving timelines. Dried beans don't go bad. Frozen vegetables wait patiently. Even fresh produce, when you're actually cooking regularly, gets used before it wilts. My food waste dropped dramatically, which means more of what I bought actually became meals.

There's also the restaurant factor. When eating out options were limited in my early vegan days, I cooked more at home. That habit stuck. We now eat out maybe twice a month instead of the weekly dinners we used to default to. That alone probably saves us another $200-300 monthly, though I didn't include that in my grocery calculations.

What about the "expensive vegan" trap?

I'll be honest: you absolutely can spend a fortune eating plant-based. Those $8 cashew cheese wheels, the $6 oat milk lattes, the $12 frozen vegan pizzas. I've bought all of them. In my first year, I probably did spend more because I was trying to replicate my old diet with expensive substitutes.

The shift happened when I stopped trying to eat vegan versions of my former meals and started building new patterns around whole foods. A big pot of dal with rice. Vegetable stir-fries with tofu. Bean tacos with homemade salsa. Simple, satisfying, shockingly cheap.

Have you ever tracked what you actually spend on food? Not what you think you spend, but the real numbers? It's uncomfortable, but illuminating.

What this taught me about assumptions

I spent over a decade in finance watching people make decisions based on assumptions they'd never tested. I saw investors cling to beliefs about markets that data clearly contradicted. I watched colleagues repeat conventional wisdom without ever questioning it.

And here I was, doing the same thing with my grocery cart. I'd absorbed the cultural narrative that eating "healthy" or "ethical" meant spending more. I never questioned it because it felt true. It matched what I saw in glossy magazine spreads of high-end vegan restaurants and influencer posts featuring $15 smoothie bowls.

The reality in my own kitchen told a different story. One backed by receipts, not assumptions.

Final thoughts

I'm not suggesting everyone will save exactly 28% by going plant-based. Your mileage will vary based on where you live, what you ate before, and how you approach the transition. But I am suggesting that the "veganism is expensive" narrative deserves scrutiny.

Sometimes the most expensive thing we do is keep believing something without checking if it's actually true. My receipt folder taught me that. It also taught me that the best financial advice I ever took wasn't from my years on Wall Street. It was from a documentary about factory farming that made me reconsider what I put on my plate.

The savings were just a bonus I didn't see coming.