Facts of life on a four dollar a day budget.

Reality strikes....

There are pipe dreams and then there is reality,

You can hope for food from the whole paycheck  food stores and perfect meals with no child spilling their milk, or whining that they don’t like peas touching their chicken, or you can embrace reality.

A four dollar a day budget does not include steak and lobster or 5 bags of chips..  You need to figure on buying four dollars a day worth of versatile basic food and   you would be surprised what you can buy on four dollars a day if you shop wisely,

You can buy :

1. We purchase Real Parmesan cheese . It doesn’t come out of a green box,   The green box has wood pulp in it.   You would be surprised what is 8n all the boxes you buy.  They have sneaky ways of labeling ingredients so you aren’t aware of what is in those brightly colored  boxes,  
2. Real honey, 
3. Real maple syrup
4. The best quality tuna we can find at Costco.   Ditto salmon, 
5. Boneless, skinless chicken breast,   It is the lowest in fat.  
6. Good, low fat hamburger, or we make it low fat, 
7. Pork loin,   Center cut pork chops can be 3.50 a pound,   Pork Loin can be 1.00-1.69.
8. Eggs, cheese, and dry beans,  cooking scratch beans doesn’t add salt.  
9. Fresh fruit and vegetables in season    A dollar is my buy price.   Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, cantaloupe whit  each, apples at a dollar, grapes at less than two dollars, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots in 5 lb bulk at 2.28 and celery.

Baby carrots are regular carrots that have gone through a machine    It all started with a farmer that was having a really hard time selling his misshapen carrots. He solved his problem by putting the ugly carrots through a machine and making baby carrots.  Que the media blitz.  He had to convince people that his reject carrots worth twice the price of regular carrots.  There are many other new 'inventions that are toted as being healthier for you, that just reduce one bad thing and increase another.  Diet butter substitute and salad dressing come to mind.  

 Virtual paycheck.  Its a concept not everyone can grasp.   But, it is now I decide if scratch cooking something is worth my time and effort.  Face it, kids don’t care if it takes you three hours to make a tortilla .  They are going to make that tortilla disappear in three minutes  or less.   If you calculate how much you are going to save making scratch or a mix and you divide it by how many hours it takes to make it, you get a savings per hour. Now times that figure by 1.25 and it will tell you how much you are making per hour,   I think I figured that making tortillas netted my a dime an hour.   Lemon pound cake from the big bucks coffee shop,  however,  made us 212.00 an hour.  Note you don’t count passive time.

Collecting efficient scratch recipes your family will eat is a secret ingredient in eating on four dollars a day -per person. It also helps to: 

Buying  a rotation meat for a RBP and rotating a four to six week supply affords you, the cheapest and best quality meat and allows you to have a stock of food on hand,   No more scrimping and waiting with baited breath for the paycheck so you can run to the store. Instead you go to the store and buy from your basic list what is on sale for a buy price.  This simplifies your cart and affords you much more food for your dollar.   

A pantry is not built on a day, but you can build it a week at a time if you buy double whenever anything that is on your basic list that is 1/2 price.  Why pay 1.59 for a can of green beans this week and pay .50 for the same can the next week.  You are better off buying three cans the week they are on sale.  

I just watched a grocery haul u tubed by a lady with a large family.  She made a very good point:  anything that you  know if you buy 5, the family will eat five immediately, you just don't buy.    If you are buying  cans of green beans or spaghetti sauce, you buy as many as you can afford if they are at a RBP.   Set yourself a desired limit.  Four to six weeks worth is a good benchmark .

 I am anticipating a time in the fall when we  will have unusually high bills so I will set a larger limit on things that make meals.  If we had a seasonal job, this would be another reason for a larger limit.  I buy our food at about fifty percent off the regular prices.  I cant get that much of a return on my money from a bank.  I was getting fractions of a percent at the bank on my CD.  

 If I find a staple item and it is more than a RBP. I will buy a case.  Like when I  got enchilada sauce for a dime.  I watched for the pull dates and took what I had left to the food bank before it passed the date.  I paid  two dollars for the sauce,  I more than made my profit and can share with someone else. 

Random act of kindness.  There are a lot of things you can do to make someone else’s day better that don’t cost you a cent.  Take your good clean  paper bags to the food bank.  Call first, but our food bank is glad to get them.  We live in a city that has banned plastic bags, straws and utensils.  One day  I was shopping at Winco.  I saw a young man that you could tell was counting  his cart for the total.   He was buying  chunky soups.   I asked him how many he was buying.  He said two,   I had a capon that would make him be able to get three for the price he was paying for two,  I gave it to him.  He was so delighted he thanked me when I gave it to him and saw me later on the store and thanked me again,  I got the feeling that my random act that cost me nothing fed him for another night.  Some lady did that for me years ago.  It was at Albertsons,  she had a coupon that was for free gallon of milk if you spent fifty dollars.  I had three kids at home and fifty dollars was not a problem.   Free milk was a very  welcome surprise. 

You can eat very well on four dollars a day per person by incorporating a few age old basic principles that our great grandmothers used ,  updated. 

• Buy good  food when it is at a rock bottom price (RBP) and buy enough to cover your family for four to six weeks. This is done piecemeal, not all at once.   One can, or jar or package at a time.   
• Avoid  buying empty calories, junk food.--that stuff that is void of good food value. 
• Efficiently scratch cook. If something takes you three hours to make, you are not likely to do it on a regular basis.  We are all busy.  The internet and cookbooks are full of fast and easy cheap meals.  If something calls for a can of …..there are recipes that are easy to replicate that can .
• Rotate buying your protein sources (meat) by buying at a RBP and buying in bulk.  Break down your packages into meal sized portions and freeze.  Do your own butchering.   Its simple and doesn't take much time.  It saves a lot of money. Cook ground meat, de fat it if needed and freeze in meal sized portions.  This saves a lot of time and energy at meal time. 
• Simplify your purchases.   Avoid all the boxes of food.  They are usually full of stuff you don't need to feed your family like preservatives and anti caking agents.  Some have detergent and wood pulp.   Yes, its true.  
• Buy things in bulk when it makes sense.  A bag of flour, rice and a box of oatmeal from Costco in bulk can save hundreds of dollars in a year. Muffins cost a dollar to make.  Making your own mix means it takes a matter of a few minutes  to make--the cost ready made is as much as five dollars .  Peasant Bread costs .25 and takes ten minutes hands on time and that is spread between two days.   The cost: upwards of 2.50. Rice costs .02 a serving.   Oatmeal .085.  Beans .04 cents.

These are all random ideas that all contribute to making a four dollar a day budget happen.