Food Budget Update
Food Budget Update
First off, our budget is looking so great this month! I am excited to announce that we only spent $707 this month on food. I don’t expect that we will spend any more money in the next few days either. So that brings us in at $93 under budget! You know, it has actually been really easy to get our food budget down and it makes me wonder just how in the heck we were spending SO much ($1100-$1200/month) on food before we started keeping to this budget. So, since we have been eating relatively well (we are not living off of beans and rice alone, here!), it makes me realize that if we were to start eating off the super-cheap stuff we could probably cut it down by at least another $200. For now, though, I am satisfied to keep it at this level of spending.
Emergency Supplies
Secondly, after reading Frugal Dad’s recent post Is Recession Preparing a New Breed of Survivalist? I remembered that our emergency supplies are probably all out of date. We have about 12 gallons of water in the garage which is probably 1.5 to 2 years old. I need to remember to dump it on the garden and buy new water. We also need more canned food. This all leads me to another thought: about a year ago I saw a picture in some random magazine that showed a middle class family standing proudly in front of a rack of emergency supplies that they kept in their garage. Now, I think that is great, but the weird thing about the picture was that the rack had like 10 boxes of cereal on it. It is so funny that we have gotten so out of touch about basic survival that we would think that cereal is the way to go. I mean, yeah, it is fine if your power is knocked out for a few days, then you’ve got cereal (what about milk?!), but if it were a true emergency I would think that cooking basics like 10 or 20 pounds of flour, sugar, salt, etc., would be the best and most versatile thing to have. All of that was a long-winded way of saying that I might spend that extra $93, or some of it at least, on new emergency supplies.
May 29th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Thanks for mentioning my article. And yes, I would recommend spending some or all of your remaining food budget on building a small stockpile. If you don’t have an emergency you can, over time, use some things from that stockpile to hedge against future food price increases.
June 6th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
@Frugal Dad: Thanks for your comment! I hadn’t considered hedging against future food price increases at all, so that’s a great tip for me. I hope you will come back and visit soon.