Would you love or hate February if you were an accountant? Does it mess up all of your budgeting to have such a short month? Personally, I'm grateful for the short month while I track my expenses. I feel like I'm much more likely to stay within my goals when I've only got 28 days to worry about.
Okay. I'd like to share where we are at for the month. First, I want to tell you about how we save money on our food purchases. It is possible for my family to drop down in our food budget because we have a super-stocked pantry and freezer. We can switch to homemade bread for nearly free because we already have the flour on hand. If you don't have 40lbs of oats, 20lbs of flour, four gallons of blueberries, seven quarts of tomato sauce, etc etc etc, already in your cupboards, drastically reducing your spending isn't going to be so easy.
If this is something that you are interested in, buy an item or two of the dry goods that you use often in bulk each month. Build up your supply slowly, and keep your family's eating habits in mind. For example, we eat oatmeal every weekday. It makes sense for us to buy oats in bulk. Bulk spelt on the other hand, not so much. Some things, like chocolate chips or bacon, you might eat more of (and therefore actually spend more on) if you buy them in bulk and have them abundantly available. So it doesn't make sense to buy those in bulk either. Go visit one of my favorite blogs for more bulk buying tips and tricks--
I have to add a shameless plug here about where we get the majority of our bulk foods, our local buying club. Last year I launched a buying club out of my back porch, through which my family makes about 80% of our purchases. We utilize an online based ordering program called Wholeshare that lists the Tierra Farms, Regional Access, and Four Seasons catalog, plus whatever the group leader lists or decides to be connected with. It's like social networking for food sales. The Wholeshare program does charge a small percentage of each item, but makes the catalogs so much more accessible, creates a list of available splits and places the order (if it's reached minimum) when it's due. No more finding someone to complete a case with you or fronting money. I charge a 10% fee (given to me as food credit) on your total order for my time, fridge/freezer power, supplies, etc. Feel free to REGISTER and check it out -- we'll have another order going through on 2/24/13 and arriving on 3/1/13 (just in time for a new month's food budget!)
On top of our full pantry, we are lucky enough to stock our freezer from our extensive backyard garden farm as well as our CSA share. In our garden, we focus on things that are easy to put up for the winter. Lots and lots of tomatoes, summer squash, peppers, green beans, broccoli, berries. We also set aside space for fun unusual/expensive things, like okra, watermelon, and herbs.
Even though our garden provides us with an abundance of food, we still cherish our CSA share. Because of our work on the planning committee, and our work as a drop-off location, our share is discounted. Furthermore, my partner's employer pays for half of it. Usually we are able to eat our share each week, freeze a batch or two of extra greens, and commit our garden space to food to put up for winter.
We are very, very lucky as far as food is concerned. Of course, we work hard for our food and for our food connections (hence the discounted share and wholeshare food credit.) I'm explaining this in so much detail because I am hoping that you can glean some information off of this that will help you find these connections in your own life. If you are looking to get good food for cheapsies you should get involved with your local food movement and start making connections with people and farmers. Often, during the busy times of the season, farms will need extra help and will pay you in extras, or give you discounts at the farm stand. Or maybe start your own Wholeshare group!
I suppose I should also add that we have also lopped quite a bit off of our food costs by raising backyard chickens, and rabbits. Our rabbits were a first for us this past year, and worked out wonderfully. We had two sets of litters in the spring and early summer. Their meat has fed both us and the dog for less than $4/lb. It has the added bonus of being as local as you can get!
As for our chickens, we had started out with four beautiful birds, but within a years time that figure doubled. As a family of five 'mostly' vegetarians, we were still buying one to two dozen eggs each week, and barely breaking even with chicken feed vs cost of local eggs. So, I did some math and decided to double that number again. The plan was to feed enough birds to give my family three dozen a week to eat and four dozen a week to sell, essentially making our egg eating nearly free.
So, last spring, my family hatched out four dozen eggs. At one point we had about 50 birds of various sizes and breeds out there. Yes, it was madness. Amazing, amazing madness. I sold as many extras as I could, and harvested the remaining roosters for both ourselves and for our large lucky dog. Currently, we are getting about an average of 8 eggs a day and so have about two dozen available for sale each week. Once spring hits and the sun shines bright, that number will double.
Thanks to the chickens and the backyard rabbits, I have spent about $100 on purchasing meat in the past year. Most of that was bacon. Oh, bacon.
The take home message is that there are quite a few "hidden" costs within our monthly budget. I spend about 20 hours/month on our buying club and CSA location. I spend about 20 hours/week in the kitchen cooking all that bulk food into meals. And I spend about five hours/week on our livestock. But when these hours translate into better/more nutritious food + stimulating home education + better environmental impact + lighter monetary budget, the trade off is worth it. Perhaps you have a few hours a week that you could trade in for money off of your own budget? I hope I've given you a few ideas of where to get started without overwhelming you!
So, finally, this leads me to where we are at now. Remember my $400/month goal? Well, we are at $450 as of 2/9/13. Although I don't plan on spending any more for the month, you never know what 18 days will bring. We are adjusting to some new eating habits(paleo-ish/gluten free dairy free-ish-- I'll talk more in an upcoming entry about why.) We also happened to run out of both honey and maple syrup. I toyed with the idea of going without for a few weeks but having recently made the executive decision to stop buying sugar, I didn't want to deal with the threatened mutiny that having no sweeteners on hand guarantees. Also, honey is a huge natural immune booster that I'm not ready to give up even if it's "almost" Spring.
I also am not sure that $400/month is totally reasonable. I worry that without fresh fruits and some of our other splurges, we would need a multivitamin. Which are just as costly. As it stands, I think that $450 for the five of us is more reasonable and comfortable. It still saves us about $150 dollars, and you can't laugh at that.
Do you wonder what we are giving up in that $150 cut? Beer, coffee for myself, extra fruits, storebought bread, storebought yogurt, storebought cheese, chips/ricecakes/snacks to name a few. In the end, we are probably much healthier living cheaper!
Next post, I will talk about what we spent our money on this month and provide a copy of our menu so you can see how I use it.
Until then!
