While reading the Gluten-Free Girl blog a few weeks ago I noticed a post about United Way’s Hunger Action Week. By the time I read the post, it was too late to take part in the actual week. Since she has been cooking so much, I showed the United Way website to Rachel. I wanted her to start thinking about how much money we are spending. I also knew she would be interested as she has asked me several times over the past 6 months if we could try and spend $100 for groceries for a week. This, usually after we go grocery shopping and she watches me pay. I kept saying no way, we couldn’t do that. But this challenge got me thinking. Why not? And after showing Rachel the website, I had no choice but to agree anyway. She was all over it. We informed Pat and Alex, who both looked a bit startled a first and then resigned. We decided to begin on Sunday, February 28th and end on the following Saturday.
Here are the rules:
1. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner spending only $7 per day, per person. Maximum $22 per day for family of 4.
2. Salt and pepper don't count but all other seasonings, cooking oils, condiments, snacks, drinks, and everything else do.
3. Don't use food you already own.
4. Don't accept food from family, friends, coworkers and others. Not even the free samples from Costco!
5. Try to include fresh produce and healthy protein each day.
To begin, we added up our weekly total based upon the Hunger Challenge Budget. At $22.00 per day for a family of 4, we have $154.00 to spend for 7 days. The kids and I talked about what they might like to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. On Friday we headed to Trader Joe’s to do most of our shopping. We spent $69.00. To that we added $29.00, the cost of our weekly produce delivery from Jubilee Farm. We also added in the price of items we already had at home ( not really supposed to do this, but I didn’t want to waste what we already had), for a total of $120.00 spent. We figured we better not spend all our money at the beginning of the week, since there are sure to be some items we will need money for later. Shopping at Trader Joe’s with a budget was fun. Rachel pushed the cart and Alex added up the price of all the food on my calculator.( I used to do this in my head on shopping trips as a kid!) We made sure we had enough food for all our breakfasts, most lunches and all our dinners. Each kid chose a luxury item. On Saturday the kids ate lots of chocolate and drank Inca Cola, knowing those were not in the hunger action week budget. Went to bed looking forward to the week…
Here are the rules:
1. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner spending only $7 per day, per person. Maximum $22 per day for family of 4.
2. Salt and pepper don't count but all other seasonings, cooking oils, condiments, snacks, drinks, and everything else do.
3. Don't use food you already own.
4. Don't accept food from family, friends, coworkers and others. Not even the free samples from Costco!
5. Try to include fresh produce and healthy protein each day.
To begin, we added up our weekly total based upon the Hunger Challenge Budget. At $22.00 per day for a family of 4, we have $154.00 to spend for 7 days. The kids and I talked about what they might like to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. On Friday we headed to Trader Joe’s to do most of our shopping. We spent $69.00. To that we added $29.00, the cost of our weekly produce delivery from Jubilee Farm. We also added in the price of items we already had at home ( not really supposed to do this, but I didn’t want to waste what we already had), for a total of $120.00 spent. We figured we better not spend all our money at the beginning of the week, since there are sure to be some items we will need money for later. Shopping at Trader Joe’s with a budget was fun. Rachel pushed the cart and Alex added up the price of all the food on my calculator.( I used to do this in my head on shopping trips as a kid!) We made sure we had enough food for all our breakfasts, most lunches and all our dinners. Each kid chose a luxury item. On Saturday the kids ate lots of chocolate and drank Inca Cola, knowing those were not in the hunger action week budget. Went to bed looking forward to the week…
A family in our homeschool group (9 kids) actually sticks to a grocery budget of $50 per week, with $100 every third week!!
ReplyDeleteOkay, so they're on a farm, but still. They do stuff like make their own crackers (tastier and cheaper, according to her post about it!). Amazing, don't you think?
When we were first married w/new babies, Bill asked me to try to cut $$$ out of our grocery budget and I thought "what?? how would I do that? We have to have food, right?" Sigh...what a long way we've come since those days!! :)
I would love to farm and have a budget of $50.00 per week. How cool!
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