I've had many people ask me how we can eat healthy and still maintain a $75 a week budget. So this is what we do.
-We buy a quarter of a cow a year which gives us enough meat to last throughout the year. (I should mention that we don't count this into our weekly budget so that makes a difference I know).
-We make a weekly menu and stick withit. We only buy the items we need for the weekly menu and I stick hard with my grocery list.
-We eat up all of our leftovers. Some meals will last us three-four days.
-We have started our own garden and plan to eat most of our veggies from this.
-We buy a lot of our fruits and veggies when it is cheap and freeze the extra's that we are not going to eat. I also have a wonderful mother-in-law who cans a lot of food and shares with us.
-I try to make up a bigger portion of our dinners so we can freeze half. Most of the time it doesn't cost us but maybe a dollar or two more.
Hopefully this helps out with how we manage to do it. We often only eat two or three more expensive meals and the rest are cheaper meals. We also very, very rarily ever eat out. Maybe once every 2-3 weeks I will take the kids out to subway but as far as eating out for dinner that only happens maybe once every 3-4 months.
I also don't buy the kids a lot of snack food and no juice. Our juice is either homemade lemonade or water. And they each only get two glasses of milk a day. I know this may seem like a mean mom, but most of the time they only ask for water anyway. Chris and I also did away with drinking soda and drink water instead. It is actually pretty easy to eat on $75 a week and we sometimes have some money left over at the end of the week.
If anyone has any additional ideas to keeping a small budget I would love to hear them. I would love to get my budget back down to $50 a week.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
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Thanks for this info, Kristina. It's a huge cost-savings that you get your meat from family - that seems to be a large junk of our budget. And we have yet to go organic on the meat!
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