For my birthday this year, my lovely bride bought me Dave Ramsey's My Total Money Makeover subscription. Yes, I'm a money geek. The subscription gets you his radio show podcasts, access to forums on his site and so forth. There's an interesting thread going on in the frugal living forum where folks who are trying to pay down their debts have challenged each other to live on $75 in groceries for a month. The discussion in the forum has established that this is $75 per person.
Could you do that? It amounts to $2.50 a day. As I've thought about it, I'm struggling to see how I could get anywhere close to that. I would think that proteins, fruits and vegetables would wipe that budget out in no time.
I'd also suggest that consuming large amounts of legumes is unfit for polite company, so that eliminates a steady diet of beans as a protein source.
Oatmeal for breakfast would be cheap. Tuna sandwiches for lunch would be cheap. What does that leave for dinner? Cook a monster pot roast early in the week and carve that up over time?
Hmmm.
6 comments:
Well, back when I was a Starving Student (TM) in the early 80s, I largely subsisted on a concoction consisting of potatoes, carrots, onions, and a bit of hamburger cooked up in a frying pan, and drank about a gallon of milk per week. This was occasionally supplemented with corn bread and beans (cooked from dry beans, which are about a third the price of canned beans). Except for the milk and hamburger, pretty much everything I ate was as cheap as dirt. Literally. As in, I compared the price of potting soil to bags of potatoes, onions, and carrots, and the prices were all comparable.
I never really figured out how much I was spending, but it wasn't much. I think it was on the order of about $30 a month at the time, which is probably pretty close to $75 a month now after adjusting for inflation.
Oh, and I baked my own bread, too, using flour that I bought in 25 lb bags. I did figure the price on that, it was about thirty cents a loaf at the time.
Tim, I love the price comparison with dirt. LOL!
At Costco, you can get the 25# bags of rice that would take care of the starches. Milk is expensive, so that adds up quickly. It's something like $3-4 per gallon, so one gallon a week would set you back, say, $14. I agree on the dry beans. Canned beans are a waste of money.
Hmmm. Maybe this is doable.
Yup, the dry vs. canned beans prices is a big indicator of how things go: you can eat a lot cheaper by using foods that take more preparation. Basically, you can trade off spending time against spending money. The cheap foods will mean devoting a couple of hours a day to food preparation. If you have no money, but do have the time, it's a good trade.
Tim,
Great comments!
KT,
If I suggested that what you are intimating is "rationing", would I be a racist?
Walmart here has chicken hind-quarters on sale every week or two for $3 on a ten pound sack. (machine processed and nearing the "sell by" date-- neither matters if you're willing to spend two minutes cleaning up a few quill pin ends or if you're going to re-freeze it the moment you get home)
Ramen also goes for about 3 for a dollar or less, not much nutrition but it is a good filler.
Irish soda bread made with buttermilk powder and raisins or other dry is inexpensive, filling and a decent breakfast..... Also lasts pretty well.
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