I basically, feed three of us on less than the USDA stars for my husband and I. Basically, for 70 percent of it and I have a back up stock of food. A large back up stock of food. I might not have that much, but I know that I'm goimg to have major expenses the last quarter of the year. Mostly Christmas, taxes, and medical. I cannot get fifty percent on my money any other place.
It takes looking at your grocery shopping from a different perspective. It won't happen overnight if you don't have an influx of money. But, it can happen. You can do it one can at a time.
Steps. One step at a time.
- Start by reducing drastically your consumption of snack and junk food. That can be 25 percent of your food budget. Buy popcorn and a air popper. Make inexpensive muffins.
- Find the TWO stores in your area within a five mile radius that have the cheapest prices. In our area, it would be Winco and Fred Meyers most of the time.
- Go through the ad and find the basics for meals that are at a low cost. This is usually produce on season and usually you can find a so called loss leader protein.
- Pick a protein that is a remarkable price. Here, I can use under two dollars a pound for my benchmark. The one exception is good ground beef, and that is closer to 3.00. Buy enough to have that meal for a month. Example : if you want beef once a week, imwoukd buy enough for four or five meals. When I got home, I would cook it and de-fat it, and portion control it for the freezer.
- Buy whatever you can that's inexpensive, maybe eat vegetarian a couple of meals, to get you through. Your object is to , in rotation, buy one RBP protein a week and buy enough for a months worth of that meal.
- Decide what proteins your family will eat, make a list. Ours is pork ( 1/2 binkessmpork loin 1.69, whole chicken or split chicken breast that I debone and make broth from the bones, hamburger (7 percent ) , fish, cheese, beans.
- Develop a matrix that fits your family for meal plans. Ours is 1 beef, 1 fish or seafood, 3 pork or chicken, and 2 vegetarian. That makes meal planning easy and quick. You do need to have a plan. It saves a ton of money and stress.
- Now that we have tackled the two most expensive catagoriesmofmyourmfoodbill. We need to tackle the rest. Research the RBP of the stable items you use to make your meals. Everyone has ten or so go to dinner options their family likes. List your ingredients and do a price list so you can find the RBP for those things. Everyone has a it's of 10-15 items that they buy on a regular basis. We eat a lot of Tex-mex and Italian. Our list would be pasta, pasta sauce. Green beans, diced tomatoes, beans, rice, mild chilies. Know the RBP of these items, whaeveryour family's list is. We are more worried about the things we use in a regular basis than that can of cranberry sauce we use once a year.
- Getting started, when one of the things on your list is a RBP, buy as many as you can afford, as many as you have decided you need to stock, or as many as they will let you ( limits) . I respect their limits and ask for them to allow me to buy more if I am trying to fulfill a list for the food outreach.
- Pretty soon, you will have a stock built, you won't be on a position to desperately have to go to the store. You will be able in a pinch to get by , at least for a few days.
- With a stock built, you go to the store to 1) buy your rotation protein. Some weeks you will buy two, some weeks you wont buy any. It's driven by the market. 2) dairy. Buy a months supply of anything with a far out pull date that is a RBP. 3) produce you will need to fil out your meals preferably in season, And 4) any stock item that you are short of and is a RBP.
Use coupons, Ibotta. And RBP to enable you to get the lowest possible price on the things you need.
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