Frugality

Below is my daily menu for the Live Below the Line Challenge.  I’ll be having the same thing every day except Friday. That day I will have my breakfast meal twice and a burrito for dinner.

It looks like I didn’t do a very good job with my shopping.  My daily calorie count is too low. In order to get enough calories I needed to buy food that was higher in fat and/or sugar. I will have a little bit of cereal and milk left over so I could add in a couple bowls of cereal somewhere.

Since I’m about 40-50 pounds overweight and the challenge is only for 5 days it wouldn’t be impossible to get by on this level of calories.  That being said,  I have full day continuing legal education classes on Wednesday and Friday.  There will be free food provided there and I most likely will eat some of that free food.  Doing so will mean I fail the challenge but I’m ok with that. If I can go Monday through Friday without spending anything on food I’ll feel like I accomplished something. For me the challenge is more about exerting a little self control over what I eat more than it is about seeing how little I can spend on food each day.

This menu may seem unhealthy to many of you, but it is actually healthier than what I usually eat.  Compared to my usual diet of fast food, soda, chips and other junk food this menu isn’t that bad.  Also, I will be having at least a little bit of fruit and vegetable each day which is not usually the case. This challenge does show that it is very difficult to eat healthy on such a low budget.  Healthy foods such as vegetables just don’t have enough calories per dollar to make up much of a super low budget diet. I might use the knowledge gained from this challenge to do the challenge again next month and see if I can come up with a healthier menu that provides a higher number of calories.

I’m going to be doing my version of the Live Below the Line Challenge for the next 5 days. After reading about the Live Below the Line Challenge in a post at My Money Blog, I decided to to do the challenge myself.  The basic idea of the challenge is that you eat for $1.50 a day for five days.  The $1.50 a day represents the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line.  The purpose of the challenge is to raise money to fight poverty.  I’ll be making a donation when I complete the challenge and if you want you can visit the challenge site and donate as well.

The official challenge is April 29-May 3, but I’m starting my challenge today.  This works out better for me since I’m impatient and want to start now.  Also I have CLEs next Wednesday and Friday with free food and since I these CLEs are expensive I want to get my full value out of them. My April Food Challenge was a failure but I think I can do this challenge since it is only 5 days.  According to the rules of the challenge the full cost of all items consumed must be included in the budget. This means I can’t buy a jumbo bag of rice and only count the cost of what I eat. That would make the challenge too easy.  The challenge does allow spices to be prorated or sharing food costs between people.  Too keep things simple though I just did one $7.50 shopping trip and that will be the only food I eat for the next five days.  I’ve listed the food I bought and the cost below.  I’m going to post every day of the challenge sharing what I ate for the day.

The total came out to less than $7.50 but I’m not including sales tax.  I’ll probably add a little salsa to my burrito and that prorated cost would use up the remaining money.  It isn’t the healthiest menu although it is probably better than what I normally eat. I’ll be having cereal with a banana for breakfast and a hot dog and beans with carrots on the side for lunch and dinner four days. The last day I’ll be eating cereal twice and have the burrito for dinner. I have ten bananas so I can also have a banana as a snack sometime during the day.  I got chocolate milk because it was on sale for less than skim milk and I needed to stretch my money as much as possible.  I could have done this even cheaper by buying dry beans instead of pork and beans or just buying oatmeal instead of cereal and milk.  I’m lazy though and wanted stuff that was easy to make and I know I’d get tired of oatmeal after a couple of days.  I haven’t figured out the calories and nutrition yet.  I’ll share that information when I post my daily meals.

This might be a strange thing for the writer of a frugality blog to say but I believe it is true. If you want to get ahead financially increasing your income is more important then reducing your spending. I have been able to keep my spending at a very low level for years but I haven’t been able to save much money. This year since I started working my better paying full-time job in addition to my part-time job I’ve managed to save well over 50% of my income. I’ve long thought that if I could just get a decent paying job it would be easy to save money. Now that I have a decent job I’ve found out that I was right. It is easy to save money now. I’m not really making that much money either. At my current rate I’d make a little over $40,000 for the year which is about the average annual salary in the United States.

My views on this subject might be somewhat skewed by the fact that I have always found it easy to keep my spending at a low level. When I read articles on how to save thousands a year by cutting cable and skipping lattes they weren’t any help to me because I never developed wasteful spending habits in the first place. I suppose if you are a spendthrift then it would probably be better to learn how to control your spending rather than increase your income since a spendthrift will likely just increase their spending to match any increase in income. For most people though, increasing income is better than reducing spending. There is a limit to how much you can reduce your spending. There is no limit on how much you can increase your income. I think the big advantage that cutting spending has over increasing income is that it is much easier to cut spending. My job will be ending next month and I doubt I’ll be able to get my income back to its current level any time soon. It is easy for me to find ways to make a little extra money but I’ve had a hard time finding ways to make decent money. That is something I will work on for the rest of the year.

In the movie “This is 40” the main characters are financial disasters. When Paul Rudd’s character is disappointed in the sales of Graham Parker’s new album, Parker states that he has learned to not worry about the sales and to just keep his monthly nut small. That advice is too late for Rudd but it is good advice.

Your monthly nut is the amount of money you have going out for expenses every month. You should know how much that is and you should make enough money to easily cover those expenses every month. It would also be wise to keep the monthly nut small by avoiding debt and unnecessary expenses that can’t

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For the past month or so my usual breakfast has been a couple of scrambled eggs. I’ve been able to get eggs on sale for $1 a dozen. That comes out to 8.33 cents per egg. Missouri charges sales tax on food so I figure my two egg costs about 18 cents. It might be another penny or two when you add in the cost of cooking spray, but it is still going to be less than two bits for breakfast.

A two egg breakfast is only about 160 calories which isn’t much for a meal so the calories need to be made up later. I’ve found that two eggs is a satisfying breakfast for me and three eggs seems to be too much. I could add a banana or orange for around a dime more to add some calories to the meal and make it a little more nutritious. I often take a piece of fruit to work and have it as a snack later in the morning. It works for me.

Back when I kept my food budget under $100, before I started indulging my penchant for junk food/fast food too often, people would wonder how I did it. Some would even say it wasn’t possible. There are a lot of cheap breakfasts and other cheap meals that are possible if you do a little research. The meals don’t have to be unhealthy just because they are cheap. How healthy having two eggs for breakfast is, is debatable, but that breakfast is still better than the fast food/junk food I normally eat.

Since I’ve started working my full-time job in addition to my part-time job I have been indulging in fast food way too often. I’m tired after work and it seems so much easier just to have some fast food, plus I tell myself I deserve it for all the hours I’m working. For the month of February I’m going to cut way back on my fast food/junk food purchases. My goal is to cut the amount I spend on junk food/fast food in half. I’m not going to worry about the cost of my healthier food, but I expect I will lower my overall food bill.