End of Hiatus.

So between Paul finishing his thesis and life getting a whole lot crazier and tiring lately, I haven't really even thought about adding to this for a while. Hopefully now that Paul only has to defend and we're done things will be a little easier and I can get to this more often.

Step 3: Lunch

You can go ahead and give a large sigh of relief because this post is going to be a lot shorter than those last few novels.

Yeah, that totally didn't happen.

So what do you usually eat for lunch? According to your staples list, how much do your lunches cost every week?

Now, I'm going to be perfectly honest here, I am not a big fan of lunch. I'm not really a fan of breakfast either but I'd much prefer to make breakfast than have Paul ask me "what's for lunch?" In my head, I think, "What? are your legs broken? Are your arms painted on? Can't you just make yourself a sandwich?" This is mostly because lunch time is when Pearl naps and if I have to stop and make lunch, I miss out on extremely valuable productive time.

Paul is very forgiving about my dislike of thinking about what to eat for lunch. I only offer him a few options- in fact, lunch is our meal with the least options but that's simply because I don't care enough about it to be creative. As Pearl eats more and more I think I'll try harder but I'm at the point where it's neither important nor efficient.

The first thing you should know about lunches is that unless you're down to only lunch portions of a dinner, leftovers should only be left for another dinner. This is because dinner is usually the most expensive meal of the day and costs a lot more than lunch, so it's cheaper to use a meal for multiple dinners rather than just one dinner and then lunch. When we get to the point where there's only enough for one person to have a meal, it becomes Paul's lunch (he requires more variety than I do), but other than that, Paul gets the following options:

Popcorn

Ramen noodles (Paul has a bizarre love of Ramen noodles and since they're 9 cents a package and he doesn't eat them a lot, I'm resigned to let him have them even though they're terrible for you)

Salad- you can usually find a head of lettuce from $0.80-$1.00 and we only use 1/3 to 1/2 of a head at a time, combined with tomatoes or other veggies from our garden and an egg or two and homemade dressing, it's a fast meal that costs less than $0.75.

Most of the time though, we eat sandwiches-

I LOVE peanut butter and jelly/honey sandwiches. I could eat them every day for the rest of forever and probably not get sick of them. I even purposely buy peanut butter jelly beans and raspberry or strawberry jelly beans just to eat them together for a peanut butter sandwich taste- and yes, I am fully aware that that is strange. Eventually though, Paul gets tired of peanut butter so he'll sub in ham from Sam's Club.

The key to affordable sandwiches (or affordable toast or french toast, etc) is HOMEMADE BREAD.

With the advent of "cheap" sliced bread, women just stopped making homemade bread and somehow or another the idea that making bread was hard or impossible or expensive became accepted as fact. When bread machines became popular in the mid to late 90's, people started making bread again but the loaves are so small that it's almost a waste if there are more than 2 of you.

I've used several different recipes and I find I prefer the taste, texture, and variability of my grandmother's bread the best. It takes about 3 hours from idea to bread but it's so worth it! I have other recipes that can be finished in around 45 minutes- total- short enough you can't blame a time shortage on not making bread.

Using bulk yeast purchased from my local "health food" store and bread flour from Sam's Club, a loaf of plain white (and super delicious!) bread costs just 50 cents- it's even less if I make the bread half wheat (I grind my own) or cracked wheat.

An average loaf of not-cheap-paste-bread costs about $2.50 at Walmart which runs about 12.5 cents a slice compared to a little more than 2 cents per homemade. If you were to get the wholly unappetizing and unhealthy bread for $1.00, its still around 5 cents a slice- double the price.

Something else we do to save money is that we make our own freezer jam. I promise you that there is not a single average priced jam on the market that tastes as good as strawberry freezer jam. It takes just half an hour to make enough to last 6 months at least and it's 1/3 the price or less of store bought preserves. The trick is to watch for fruit in season and when it's really on sale because stores always overstock and you can get ripe fruit for a steal. If you don't like jam on your sandwiches, buying honey in bulk is a really good option too- Cox's honey is just about the best stuff I've ever had. It comes in a 5 lb bucket and while it's not the cheapest, $0.14 cents a serving is pretty decent.

Lunch time is also where we have a sort of splurge. I didn't grow up with a lot of money- actually I grew up with VERY little money but we always had Jiff peanut butter. After we got married, I started using the Walmart brand because it was cheap. I didn't eat as many peanut butter sandwiches for a long time just because they just weren't hitting the spot until last summer when I was at my mom's house and had one for lunch. It was the best thing I could remember eating in a long time (and I only make food that I think is great). I asked Mom about it and she was like, "Um, yeah, there was a reason we always had Jiff peanut butter even when we had no money," (my mom loves peanut butter sandwiches just as much as I do). I'm serious, I have no problem just eating it straight out of the jar, something Paul finds really weird but he's very accepting of my quirks.

I purchase my extra-crunchy Jiff in bulk from Sam's, so it's definitely cheaper than picking it up at the normal grocery stores, but you really don't have to buy brand name peanut butter if you don't want to- I'm sure that to most people, peanut butter is just peanut butter- and there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to be more adventurous, you could try purchasing peanuts and making your own peanut butter. I've heard it can be cheaper but since I have something I like and it works budget wise, I have seen no purpose in pricing it out. If you have any experience with it, please comment and let me know- I'm interested in the cost comparisons even if I'm not interested in switching.

While I don't care about a lot of variety for lunch, I'm sure there are infinite possibilities. I forgot to mention that if we haven't had fruit yet, I make sure that we have some with lunch. Usually we have apples that I get in super bulk (from orchards) or, when we run out of those, we eat whatever apple is on for $1.00/lb or bananas because those are decently cheap. Depending on sales we may have grapes and during garden season we grow our own melons and go blueberry picking.

I guess what I'm saying is, think of your favorite lunches- are there ways you can think of off the top of your head to make them cheaper? Can you think of other cheap non-perishable things for lunch (like Mac and Cheese) that you can buy in bulk to make them more affordable? Let me know what you come up with- I'm sure Paul would appreciate some more variety.

Wow. So much for the promise of a shorter post. Sorry about that but you're probably used to it by now.

Step 3. Breakfast.

So for the next couple of posts I'm going to go over what to do about meal planning on your budget. I think it may be easiest to take it meal by meal so we'll start with the first meal of the day, breakfast.

For a really long time I thought that eating cheaply meant little to no variety but while it's true, you're not going to just be able to eat everything you want all the time, there are a TON of things you can make for very little money.

The hard part of this may be that cold cereal is not be an option anymore. Now, I haven't checked the prices of Malt-O-Meal cereal for a little while but I think they're around $2 a bag which doesn't seem too bad but then you have to account for how much milk you use with it too and if you're anything like me, you use a lot of milk.

For a family of four, the price of milk each morning (if you only use a cup each) is $1.32, now multiply that by 7 and you're spending $9.24 a week on breakfast milk only- that's 26% of a weekly budget of $35 (if you add 2.50 per kid)- and that's not including the price of cereal or possible fruit.

On top of this, cereal, especially reasonably priced cereal, is not particularly healthy. It's full of sugar and processed carbs that neither prepare our bodies properly for the day but can leave us feeling sluggish and undernourished which means we feel the need to eat food more to compensate.

Now the good part, options:

There are loads and loads of options for breakfast that are cheap, healthy, AND delicious.

We're big fans of hot cereal- especially during the winter and it's almost ridiculous how much money you can save that way.

Cornmeal is something that we purchase in a 5 gallon bucket but you can find it at any Walmart in a smaller canister for about $1.50. For a cup of cooked cereal it costs about 6 cents (a cup is all I can eat- Paul can eat just a little bit more). It doesn't take much butter- maybe half a teaspoon and with a little salt it's delicious and cheap.

Oatmeal is another really great, healthy option- especially if it's not quick-oats. We also buy our oats in 5 gallon buckets but if you were to go to Sam's Club, you could pick up a 9lb package for $6.98. It takes about 1.5 cups of cooked cereal to fill Paul up but that only costs 13 cents. If you add half a tablespoon of brown sugar and a pinch of cinnamon, you're only adding another cent- that's 14 cents to feed a grown man and keep him satisfied until lunch time- crazy!

Grits, Cream of Wheat, and homemade cracked wheat are also really budget friendly hot cereals to keep you warm on cool mornings.

Let's compare the cost of cornmeal and oatmeal to the cost of cereal milk for a family of 4 for 1 week. Milk: $1.32/morning $9.24/week (26% of 35/week budget)

4 cooked cups of cornmeal plus 1 tablespoon butter and some salt:

$0.31/morning $2.17/week (6.2% of a $35/week budget)

4 cooked cups of cooked oatmeal plus 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and some cinnamon:

$0.37/morning $2.59/ week (7.4% of a $35/week budget)

Hot cereal only takes 5-ish minutes to make, it's not even that much work but look at how much it saves!

But what if you don't feel like hot cereal? Can you eat anything else?

You betcha!

Homemade pancakes and waffles (with homemade syrup) definitely take more time initially than hot cereal but they're easy to freeze and reheat when needed. I'm not going to make this post even longer by detailing how much they cost item by item but homemade syrup only costs about $0.35 for 4.5 cups (that's more than a liter) and the rest of this I'll save for later.

Other delicious options are homemade yogurt, eggs, or just plain toast (so simple, yet EXTREMELY cheap if you bake your own bread).

The more you save on the main dish, the more you can spend adding to the meal with fruit etc.

After I finish going over how to get started, I'm going to post recipes that I use, broken down by cost.

Look at your breakfast totals, do you see ways you can cut back? Do you see ways you can move in a positive direction by incorporating food that costs a little less but maybe takes a bit more time to prepare?

Step 2.

STEP 2 PART 1

After you've figured out where you want to be I want you to do some more calculating.

I want you to sit down and think about what you eat in a week. You can do this literally with a food journal or you can estimate ( I estimated and it worked just fine). I think I went by meal-type instead of by day.

Here are some questions I want you to answer:

1. What are the staples that you use on a regular basis? (ie. how much bread, eggs, flour, milk, butter etc. do you use in a week?)

2. What do you eat for breakfast every day? How much of each item do you go through in an average week?

3. What do you eat for lunch? How much of each item do you go through?

4. What do you eat for dinner on a regular basis?

5. What snacks do you eat regularly? How much do you go through in a week?

6. Are there any dietary restrictions in your family that cause you to need certain products? How much of that/them do you go through in a week?

Now comes the tricky part. I want you to try and figure out the approximate cost of each thing on your list. You don't have to get every one of them but chances are if you use them a lot, you probably know the prices almost off the top of your head.

Here are some of the things on my list:

Milk $2.65/gallon $0.33/cup

Cheddar Cheese $11.13/ 5lbs $0.14/oz $1.11/cup

All Purpose Flour $6.43/ 25lbs $0.06 a cup

Eggs $2.48/3 dozen $0.07/egg

I have pages and pages in a notebook full of the prices of things. When I made freezer jam, I even figured out how much per serving it was. Knowing how much things are, helps me know exactly how much each meal costs. Once I figure out how much something I eat on a regular basis costs, I add that to the list. So if I know that a piece of bread costs about 2 cents and peanut butter is 10 cents a serving and freezer jam is 6 cents, then I automatically know that a peanut butter sandwich is $0.20.

Right now, I'm working on a spreadsheet with everything I have priced and ready to go along with where to go to get that price. Whenever I find something on my list that's a better price, I make a note to purchase it there next time so I can bring down my totals. If food prices go up (and they have recently), I begrudgingly make a note and change the price to reflect that.

I guess the goal here is to be as honest as you can be with yourself. That way you'll always be able to feel justifiably accomplished.

STEP 2 PART 2.

Once you start your list, try and find out places you can purchase your staples for less. For us, this meant getting a membership to Sam's Club. Sam's Club has been a really big blessing to our bottom line. Because Paul is a student, we get a year's membership for only $40 and it's definitely paid for itself by now. Another thing that is handy is that all of their prices are available online so if I think of something I haven't put on my list now, I just look it up .

Sometimes if I see a really good sale on something I use a lot, I'll stock up but I always make a note of that so that I don't continue to use the sale price after I use up the food. If it's a sale on a perishable food, I tend to stay away from it. With just the three of us I don't want to risk wasting the money. The only exception I can remember was a sale on cream cheese. I bought 10 of them for $7.80 right before the holidays because 1, they don't expire as fast as other perishables and 2, I knew I was going to be making a lot of holiday goodies (pumpkin rolls, cheesecakes etc) and they'd be used.

Step 1.

In order to start this, you need to figure out where you are now and where you want to be with your food budget. To make this a bit easier, I've broken it down into 3 questions that may help you get started.

1a. What is your current food budget? Do you even have a budget? Do you know how much you're spending every month to feed your family?

Knowing this is extremely important because it's ridiculously easy to lie to ourselves about where we are. For a while, when we first toyed with the idea of cutting back, we gave ourselves a $500 a month goal. At the end of the month, we'd tally up all of our spending at Walmart and Kroger and any fast food we may have picked up (thank you Quicken for making that so easy) and every month I'd be certain that I hadn't spent nearly $500. All of my shopping trips were for amounts of $40 or less so there was no way I'd spent the entire food budget but every month, there we were, around the $460-90 range. It was frustrating, I just had no idea what to do.

Which brings me to:

1b. Why do you spend so much on food?

If you need to, try and save your receipts for a month and then read over them. I guarantee you that you probably don't realize just how much you're buying and probably just how much you're wasting or you don't need. We all spend differently so there are many different reasons that the bills might be so high.

Some people may be love a bargain and buy anything they see that they MAY like if it's on sale. Sales are nasty things that trick our brains into thinking they're getting a bargain and sometimes it's true but often when we think we're spending less, we buy more because we think we have "extra money".

Some people may love junk and snack food- anything pre-made or processed is automatically going to have a high price attached to it. For example, I can make a delicious, healthy, extra-large homemade pizza for around $2.50. A smaller, processed and filled with preservatives freezer pizza from Red Baron runs for almost $5. Snacks are killers too- crackers, cookies, chips, all can be terrible on the budget for very little in return. I can't believe how much you have to pay for premade rice crispy treats- it's horrifying! And soda? Don't even get me started.

Eating out can be a nasty vice. Nothing will deplete your food funds faster than eating out- especially if it's on a regular basis. When we were first married, I went through this lazy phase where I'd justify eating out for a meal because I associated it with things that might make my husband or me happy. The truth was, I was just lazy and the more I justified eating out for a meal here or there, the more I wanted to justify eating out so we did it 1-2 times a week. To feed both of us, it cost about $13-15 a meal which was 1-1.5 times what I was making for an hour's worth of work. I thought I was saving myself time, but I can make AMAZING things in only 30 minutes, things that are much better than anything you can get from Wendy's. Would you work for 2 hours just to get the results of the bag that they pass you through that window?

DISCLAIMER: I'm not trying to belittle anyone for eating out- I did it. I'm not saying that we never grab a burger from Wendy's- but it's only once every few months and most likely only going to happen if we hit some unforeseen circumstances and are stuck away from home with no access to other food or if we're on long car trip.

What happens if you can't figure out where your problem is? It's okay if you don't know, it's just helpful. Chances are that once you start your changes, you'll realize just what made your grocery bill so high.

1c. Now that you've figured out where you are and why you're there, where do you want to be?

Our $30 a week budget (perhaps soon to be a little higher) isn't going to necessarily work for larger families with more kids. However, DON'T get sucked into the trap of assuming that it's impossible to feed a larger family for less money than what you're already paying.

How to calculate a goal budget:

I'd probably start with $30 for the first one to two people. It's not low enough to seem impossible but it's a reasonable number if you're going to be cooking meals that both of you eat.

Now, comes the tricky part... kids. Most kids 10 and under don't eat a lot. We put a lot on their plates, we give them servings that are way too big but kids are smaller and they need less so if they're eating the same meals you're eating, the number of meals you get out of a dish may be a little smaller, but not much.

I know a few families with 4-5 children who maintain a $120 a month food budget. If a month has four weeks, that's $30 a week for 6-7 people. These families aren't starving, they eat pretty decently- I'm not saying that you have to be that intense about things, so maybe add $2.50 a week per kid 10 and under and $5 for 10 and up but I'd be careful not to fall into the trap of buying more simply because you think about the "extra money" you have every week. If you find that you're consistently going under budget or using the leftovers on junk food, maybe lower your budget a bit- it's all money that will stay in your pocket and gives you more of an exciting challenge.

Note: If you find that even despite your best efforts, you can't stay on your budget, try and figure out how much more you need for a reasonable week and add it. It's not going to kill you because chances are the higher total is still a lot smaller than your old budget.

Motivation.

I really believe that it's possible for just about everyone to cut down on their grocery budgets but I think, that just like every drastic change (and for us it was a drastic change), there has to be a strong enough motivator to keep you going in your new direction when temptation or boredom arises or when the gleam of the new starts to fade off.

For me, this is all sort of a game. It's a huge confidence booster to see the numbers and the savings- to know that I DID IT. I'm making a difference in my family's life without really changing a whole lot except how much money we're forking out for things we put on our forks.

Some people, are motivated by numbers, so I'll use our old budget as an example:

On average, we used to spend $400-500 a month on groceries. That's $100-125 a week on groceries.

Now we spend $120 a month on groceries for 2.5 people, which is only $30 a week.

That means we save from $280-380 every month and that adds up pretty quickly.

If we save only $280 a month, in 3 months, we've put aside enough for an entire month's rent plus utilities AND gas with almost enough left over for another week's worth of food. Isn't that insane? And we were spending that money on food that we often didn't finish or wasn't good for us in the first place.

If we saved our extra $280 a month for an entire year, we'd have $3,360. I have no idea what to do with that kind of money. It's embarrassing to think that we were squandering all of that cash.

Now that Pearl is eating solid foods and she has kind of a tricky diet to follow because of her food allergies and such, I should probably add an extra $5 a week to cover her extras but even spending $5-10 a week extra means we're still saving around $3000 a year.

At the end of the month, knowing that we've saved so much takes a huge weight off of my mind. Money issues, debt, cash flow shortages, etc weigh on you. They add a mental heaviness to your already physically tiring life and eliminating any of that burden means that there's a little extra room in life to be calm, to be happy- things I'm definitely all for.

For me though, it's not the big picture that keeps me going. I didn't even know we were saving that much cumulatively until I did the calculations just now. I really like looking at the small picture, the really small picture. I love calculating the serving price of ingredients. It helps me keep our meals on budget to think about 11 cents here and 45 cents there. Every time I have money left over at the end of the week, I'm ridiculously proud. Each week brings new opportunities for me to be creative. It's not always easy to figure out how to make meals that are nutritious, tasty, and cheap but the challenge makes it fun!

Whatever the way you keep yourself motivated, just remember, it's all worth it. And if something that used to work for you isn't working anymore- if simply considering the numbers just isn't enough, try something else for a while. And don't be too hard on yourself if you have an off week, just shrug it off and keep trying. I know you can do it!

New Angle.

So I've been thinking about how to optimize my posts here and I think that for a while I should just talk about the basics of our frugal meal plan.

I'll try and have posts about cooking basics, how to choose recipes, my feelings about coupons, how much food I keep in the house, keeping a good attitude, how to organize your recipes, etc. I'll write about what works best for us and some other ideas that might work better in different circumstances. I'm very much a fan of balance and moderation so I probably will have posts on splurges too. We'll see how everything goes.