Being Frugal

I had this saved as a draft and apparently never posted it. Here you are!!

One of the things I have been meaning to blog about is how Chris and I make ends meet while living on such a tight budget. There are days when I just want to throw money to the wind and say "who cares." But all in all, I just can't do it. I was getting lazy for a while and stopped meal planning and that seemed to cost us more money and I knew it had to end. As I looked through our cupboards one day I started thinking about how much food we already had. Now, this thought flashed me back to my childhood when I used to look through the cupboards and tell my mom "we don't have any food." Her response was always "Yes, we do." My rebuttal "no we have ingredients, not food!" Suddenly at the age of 26 and being the one paying for groceries, ingredients were very much food.

I decided to stop grocery shopping and Chris and I would survive on only what we had in the apartment. At first I figured we would only make it a week or two, but to my surprise we made it a whole month. (I went to the store only once for milk and eggs.) Now before you all jump to conclusions, we still continued to eat we'll balanced meals and never went hungry. One thing I have always been good at is freezing left overs, buying fruit when it is on sale and freezing it, and stocking up on pasta, rice and canned goods. I have large containers for flour and sugar (I am a baker) and lots of odds and ends food around the kitchen. It wasn't an easy task coming up with meals everyday, but it stopped my be lazy and forced me to plan ahead of time what we were going to eat. When we ran out of bread, I wasn't sure what to make for lunches, so I came up with the idea to make homemade flour tortillas and we had roll ups instead of sandwiches. I used my creativity and the skills my mother taught me growing up and found that spark again for being in the kitchen. Without going to the store for a whole month I saved us quite a bit of money.

I have since started meal planning and resumed my monthly trips to Winco. Here is a picture of all the groceries we got this month.

For only $150 we got all the food we need for an entire month (I will have to make a trip for milk and eggs and maybe a few apples.)



I really need to do this more often! I spoil us sometimes and forget we eat food to live, not live to eat food!!!