Grocery Budget Continued

My YNAB budget program tells me that my average monthly budget for the past 12 months is $209.74. Of course some months were less and some were more. I did not have my garden in until fall so it really doesn't factor in at all. While it did give me about $30 worth of produce, mostly salad greens, in January, that of course isn't enough.

In January I did buy 20 pounds of chicken which were on sale very cheap. I try not to think of how they were raised when I cook them. I'm looking forward to having my own flock and my own meat and eggs again. However, I'll eat the last of it probably this week. There are a few bits of leftovers in the freezer along with cheese that was on sale. These will help me out this month. I will probably make a pot of chicken soup along with a pot of pinto beans with green chili out of the leftover bones and bits of chicken, which should carry me through close to the middle of the month.

Since my garden is not producing very much I'm buying produce through the Bountiful Baskets co-op, which is a great value for the money. Through them in Jan I was able to buy a 38 pound case lot of Pink Lady apples for just $22.50, less than $1 a pound. I'm not that fond of citrus, but I love fresh apples. This time of year I eat 5-10 pounds of apples a week, so this lot should carry me over for the month. This is a terrific savings since even on sale apples at the store are about $1 a pound and some varieties regular price is $1.49 to over $2 a pound.

While I have left the average of $209.74 as the grocery budget this month, I'd like to get that down to about $150 if I possibly can. I have a lead on buying grass fed lamb and want to save up so I can buy one when they are available. I don't know the price yet, waiting for an answer back from the grower.

So what are you doing about the high price of food in your neighborhood?

Nibbling Away at the Grocery Budget

Homegrown Salad

Right now I am nibbling away at my grocery budget.  I've just run some numbers and in 2011 I spent an average of $203.16 a month at the grocery store. In December, when my garden started really kicking in, I managed to only spend $119 for the month.

I am working on being more frugal with my money in general, making sure I've turned off the lights I'm not using, cooking on my airtight wood burning stove instead of using the gas or the microwave.

I've decided I want to really cut back on my grocery bill this coming year, partly by growing all of my own vegetables and some of my own fruit. (Fruit trees take several years to come into bearing, but strawberries only take 2 years to get up to speed and of course melons only take a few months)  While I won't forgo meat entirely I will probably have some meatless days each week, replacing meat with beans and other protein foods that are less costly. This months strategy is to use up the rest of the meat that is in my freezer as well as make a dent in 5 pounds of pinto beans that were given to me.

There are many ways to stretch your food dollars. I bought a large ham before Christmas on sale for .99 cents a pound. I cooked it and had several dinners & lunches of ham, sweet potato and applesauce. Then I made 2 gallons of 15 bean soup out of the leftover bits of ham and bone. Some of that is still in the freezer.

When whole chickens are on sale I try to get several. Each one makes several meals, first roasted chicken with carrots and potatoes, then either chicken and rice soup or chicken & dumplings.  When my kids were little and I either raised a lot of chickens or bought 12 or more on sale very cheap I would cut them up myself. I would save a couple whole ones for roasted chicken dinners. The rest I packaged for the freezer as boneless skinless breasts, legs & thighs for BBQ. The backs, tails, ribs, wings and necks all went into the stock pot and I would make 5 gallons of chicken broth and then can it in pints and quarts for later. I'd use the broth for gravy or as a soup starter. I think I need to start doing these kinds of things again.

So what's on your menus for this week? Tonight I've cooked a large pork roast, so pork, brown rice and salad tonight and probably tomorrow also. Tomorrow I might pull some carrots and beets to go with the  leftover roast. Maybe I'll make a pot of soup too.

Change Should Be Gradual for Best Results

Homegrown organic salad mix, much cheaper than store bought!

When you are thinking about making lifestyle changes, whether they are because of your own core beliefs or are imposed from the outside due to things beyond your control it is always a good idea to work at them gradually.

When you are working with your budget you should take things item by item and make changes slowly. Making too many changes too fast increases your risk of failure.

Right now I am working on changing my diet to one that is nearly all home grown. I can't do that all at once, I must do it at the pace the garden sets for me. But I can concentrate on doing everything possible within the framework the garden gives me. I eat a lot of organic salad greens, generally about 2 pounds a week. at over $5 a pound this amounts to a substantial amount of grocery money each month.

I have several areas of baby lettuce production in the garden, at differing stages of development. In the beginning, as the first area began to produce leaves big enough to pick, there wasn't really enough to make a dent in the grocery budget. Now that I have several areas in production I have been able to stop buying salad mix at the grocery store. Some weeks I am not able to pick as much as I could eat, so I have adapted my diet to the level of garden production. If I don't have enough salad greens, perhaps I am able to pick beets or carrots. If I'm not able to harvest enough vegetables from the garden then I fall back on the grocery store, but now I purchase things that are a little less expensive than salad mix.

I think it's all about adaptability and doing things a little at a time. By this time next year I don't think I will be buying any vegetables from the grocery store at all. My next big ticket in the grocery dept. to work on will be fruit. I do eat a lot of fruit, especially apples and pears in the winter, probably about 3 pounds a week. It will be awhile before I am able to put in a lot of apple and pear trees. In the meantime I need to work on taking better care of the apple trees I do have so that they will bear more fruit. I'll also be putting some other fruiting plants around the place, like strawberries. And of course come summer there will be watermelons and cantaloups in the garden.

Other things in the budget that I'm slowly nibbling away at is of course the last of the debt. I won't be done with it in January like I'd hoped, because I took a nice vacation. But I'll be done with it soon and then I will be able to ramp up the infrastructure I need to become more self sufficient, like a decent building to house the rabbits and some more chickens, where dogs can't kill them. Electric fencing so I can fence off part of my land and perhaps get some dairy and meat goats. There are many other projects planned, but for now I'll just go at them a bit at a time and try not to be too impatient.

Are you thinking you don't have enough land to grow your own food? You might be surprised at how little you actually need, check out How Much Land Does it Take to Grow Your Own Food?

LOOKING FORWARD

organic baby lettuce & radishes, home grown!

Today I am thinking about the future. I soooo want to be able to stay home and putter about with the garden, some animals and play on the computer! I know that I need to get a bit more organized about every part of my life and that is a continuing process. Besides creating various income streams that will create money for me to live on in the future, I am also trying to reduce the amount of money I need to live on.

Some days it seems like I'm spinning my wheels, I'm trying to save money but I need to spend money to build the infrastructure I need for the future. But I keep plugging along! Right now I have been harvesting lovely baby lettuce for my daily salads, along with occasional radishes, carrots and beets. I've gotten my greenhouse up and am planting things in it and I'm working on another one. Details can be found over at the Edible Garden Blog. Be sure and check out Seedy Saturday, I'm giving away free garden seeds! Having all my home grown lettuce means I'm saving about $10 a week on the grocery bill, perhaps even more.

My greenhouses turn out a big crooked and ugly, but I point out to the naysayers that I'm making something useful out of stuff other people have thrown away! So who cares what it looks like? It works and does the job I need it to do!

In the meantime I've also been writing a lot of articles over on Squidoo about all sorts of things and that is a small but growing stream of income, along with my Zazzle shop and I've even sold some books in my Amazon store, so things are looking up!

I had hoped to have my debt all paid off by January but this is not going to happen. Overspending on my vacation put a dent in that, but I should be out of debt before the end of 2012, even with spending some money building new infrastructure. Because most of what I am building will give me a long term gain economically, building up my gardens, putting up a new chicken house and raising chickens, all of this will put food on the table and reduce the amount of money I spend at the grocery store, saving me money in the long run.

I recently read about a lady who is trying to spend zero cash for her family's Christmas presents by using Craigslist, bartering and her own crafting ability. I think this is a wonderful thing to do myself, tho I don't know as I will have the time needed to do it this year.

This N That

Well I have been very bad! I overspent a bit on my vacation, though I will say in my defense that a great deal of it was bank fees that I hadn't counted on, first they charge for having to convert the transaction from foreign money then they charge for you for using a foreign ATM. Next time I think I will look into having the bank order the money for me ahead of time or something. The other part was not always converting Euros to USD in my head correctly.

But I had a great time in Italy and did a lot of drawing and painting and took like 3,000 photos. No I am not pulling your leg, I really did take about that many shots.

You can see a lot of my photos and some of the places I visited over on my art blog; check the archives beginning August 15th.

Since I've been home I've been working on getting the garden back in business and last week had my first harvest of beans, baby lettuce and baby beets. Photos of those are over at The Edible Garden.

I have decided to eat up a lot of the stuff in the cabinets instead of going to the grocery store.  I have some older canned goods and need to get them eaten up before they get too old. This is also stretching my money a bit so I can buy cement for the rock wall project; we have put culverts in the dry wash so we can drive over to the other side and I am building stone walls around them and along the creek banks to keep everything from washing away. Pictures of this is also on The Edible Garden.

Another thing I've been doing is writing up a storm at Squidoo and making new things over at Zazzle. One of my articles is a yummy soup that I make, Italian Potato Soup, that tastes just like Olive Gardens. I have also been making what I call the never ending pot of soup. For instance if I make a roast chicken and make chicken and rice soup out of the leftovers, when I get to the bottom of the pot I start adding more vegetables to it and maybe even a different kind of meat and just keep eating on it.  Another one I do occasionally is clean out the fridge soup. I just toss in all the leftovers that are in the refrigerator and cook them all up together. Sometimes you have to adjust the seasoning as it might be bland, but it's always good and always different and really doesn't cost anything because you weren't doing anything with those leftovers any way and they were going to go bad and end up in the compost.

Everything Goes in Circles

There is a reason they call it the circle of life. Everything is connected to everything else. There are so many of these loops in our lives that we don't always pay attention to them. If you are trying to live simply and have a joyful, enriching life experience, you might want to take some time to observe these cycles and see how many of them you can boost in your own Cottage Economy.

The first thing that comes to mind is keeping a few chickens and raising a little garden. Chickens and gardens do go very well together in our cottage economy, as long as they are physically separated by a good fence. For example, while most of you, living on really small plots of land, as in the city, will not be able to grow all the food for a few chickens, you can easily grow some. Collard greens are excellent and high in calcium which the chickens need in abundance to make their egg shells. Collard greens are also good for people for the same reason.

In addition the chickens will be quite happy to have any bit of weeds, vegetable peelings, and old, bug infested garden truck as you have time to toss over the fence. (Chickens love bugs and worms!) Chickens are omnivorous and opportunistic eaters. They well pretty much eat anything that doesn't get them first. I have even see a flock of chickens attack and eat a small snake. This means that if you scrape all your plates and about to go bad leftovers and feed them to the chickens, you will greatly reduce the amount of chicken feed you have to buy and of course you are sending much less garbage to the landfill. (Though of course I hope that if you don't have chickens you are putting all of your food scraps into your worm bin or compost pile.)

Then of course if you are raising red worms in your compost piles you have a perfect protein food for your chickens. In fact the combination of garden greens, plate scrapings and worms may mean that you won't need to buy food for your chickens at all.

Now take cleaning out the hen house. Deep litter is the recommended way of keeping your hens. This means putting down a deep, absorbent organic base in their house, straw, leaves, sawdust, fine wood chips, etc. This is best layed over a dirt floor or a layer of sand. Toss in some more dry, absorbent bedding each week as needed. The chickens will scratch and peck around in it, finding good things to eat. The mass of manure and straw will actually begin to decompose some and set up a beneficial bacterial culture which makes antibiotics. The chickens will pick up bits of this as they scratch around and it will help them stay healthier. This is a much better scenario, getting bits of naturally existing antibiotics than being kept in a wire cage with no access to dirt or bugs and being pumped full of antibiotics in their food just to keep them alive.

When you clean out the hen house (I usually do this about twice a year, early spring and early fall) and pile it up and wet it down you then begin another bacterial fermentation. The pile will heat up to over 200 degrees F. and in doing so will kill any weed seeds, insects and most 'bad' sorts of bacteria. (the ones that cause diseases).  Each time the pile begins to cool down you turn and water it a bit and it will heat again. When it quits heating up, it is safe to put on the garden.

Now that manure pile is composted and it will have a high nitrogen content. Perfect for growing lettuces, cabbages, collards and other leafy greens that need a lot of nitrogen. And so the cycle begins again; feeding garden greens, food scraps and earth worms to your chickens in exchange for meat and eggs on your plate.

At the same time since you now have some meat and eggs of your own and you have vegetables and fruit from your garden, you are buying less at the grocery store. Besides keeping some more money in your pocket, you are now bringing home less packaging. Food packaging is probably the biggest amount of waste going to the land fill these days. I know from experience that even when I have 5 people to feed, if we are mostly eating from our own place, my actual garbage going to the land fill is reduced to about 1 bag every two weeks.

So now take a look around and look at the systems and cycles going on in your cottage economy and see how you can tweak them to get the most benefit from them.

Don't Be A Debt Slave!

Why is it that Americans are (on average) only frugal when they are facing a big financial crisis? Then once the crisis is past they don't seem to learn from their mistakes, they just go right back to their over consuming ways. If they would continue to be a bit on the frugal side, they could avoid another financial crisis!

You must be responsible for your own security. You must provide for yourself and your family. There are many ways, large and small to do this. First, get rid of your consumer debt. As long as you have the rental place, credit cards and store charge accounts hanging over your head, you will never be financially free. These things make you a slave to your debt.

If so many millions of people had not taken on so much consumer debt then the recent financial crisis in this country could have been averted or at least would not have become such a big meltdown. If every American would pay attention to where their money goes, and live a bit more frugally, they could accumulate some savings. It has taken me a long time to get where I am, and I did it very gradually over about 10 years, paying off a lot of debt and as I was getting out of debt, when I got a little breathing room, I started putting some money in savings.

Today I continue to make a budget each month and try to stick with it. If you are deep in debt I would like to recommend two things that have really helped me a lot. How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously*:  by Jerrold Mundis was the amazing book that helped me out when I felt things were hopeless. I read his original edition and it has some very good advice and many helpful tips for beating the debt trap. He even tells you how to deal with creditors and how to negotiate lower payments and interest rates. This was my financial bible for about 8 years while I dug myself out from under a mountain of debt.

An important part of Jerrold's message is that things are going to be ok, at least in America there aren't any debtor's prisons. Through true life stories of ordinary people that were once deeply in debt he gives you hope. If they did it, so can you.


Then about 2 years ago I discovered YNAB; YouNeedABudget.com I had stopped paying attention to my money and had become overdrawn in two bank accounts. A few weeks later, searching for an easy budgeting tool that I could keep open on my computer, to help remind me to pay attention to my money, I found YNAB. Jesse Mecham's sound and simple financial philosophy gave me another boost towards my goal of financial freedom.

The first "rule" of YNAB is to stop living paycheck to paycheck. To accumulate enough savings so that on the first day of the month you already have all the money you need in the bank to pay all of your living expenses for the month. In practice this means that the money you earned in June becomes the basis for your budget and the money you will spend in July. Jesse calls this your 'buffer'.

Since I get paid every two weeks, regardless of the date, one or more times a year I have a month with 3 paydays. This happened the first time about 6 months after I found YNAB. I was really paying attention to my money and making a lot of progress towards my goals, but had not managed to get my buffer in place yet.  But during this 3 payday month, the first two paydays paid all of that month's expenses and then the 3rd payday became half of my buffer. In other words on the first day of the following month I already had half the money I needed to live on for the month. When the same situation rolled around a few months later I had my complete buffer in place.

The relief of having my buffer is enormous. No more running around on payday trying to get my check and get to the bank because I have to pay a bill and am in danger of something being turned off or repossessed. I love it. I don't even worry if I'm not at work on payday, I just pick up my check and go to the bank when it suites me.

And now when I have a 3 payday month I have time to think about what I want to do with the extra check that month. I am on the last of my debt, the line of credit on my house. It should be paid off about January of 2012. So I can decide if I want to make an extra payment on that bill or buy something I'd really like to have or put it towards my vacation fund. It has become a lot of fun to think about all the things I could spend a whole paycheck on!

And here's a couple of t shirts for you depending on where you are at!

DEBT SLAVE by maryhysong
Browse more Debt T-Shirts

Financially Free by maryhysong
Browse zazzle for a different t-shirt.zazzle