Today I examined my budget for where I could find an extra $60/month for my daughter to take Piano lessons. I actually have three children who would like to take them, but I can only do one right now. I decided that we're going to have to figure out how to trim money from our food budget. I don't want to interrupt the current flow of money because the budget is tight and it's working for me. I'm slowly accumulating savings, paying off a little debt I acquired while things were rough for a few years, and keeping a close eye on all my expenses. I've already cut my food budget in half since four years ago, and I'm going to try to cut it by another 25%. What's not used for piano lessons will go to build up my emergency food storage.
People are always shocked when I tell them how much I cut. I'm ashamed to admit that most of the time, I spent more than I needed to. I didn't care where I bought food as long as it was convenient, and FoodMax was a lot of things, but convenient wasn't one of them. I also wasted a lot of food...we had spoilage like crazy. Now I'm vigilant...I know what's in the fridge and I try to use it before it spoils. I plan my menus to carefully use what I purchase. I try to buy the highest quality, least expensive foods that I can. I would prefer to buy all organic, but it's not in the budget, so I grow as many foods as I can. We even have 9 chickens in our backyard so we can have eggs without hormones and antibiotics.
So now I'm wondering...how am I going to cut it down even more? I already make pretty much everything from scratch, but I'm determined that there must be a way to do it and still maintain high quality, low cost food. I'm querying my friends to find out how to make our money stretch even further and improve our diet to boot. This is going to be fun!
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