Goals for Frugally Living Well

One of the things I'm learning through financial restriction is how much of a privilege good food is.  By "good food" I mean food that is fresh, wholesome, and unprocessed.  For a low income family, it is next to impossible to buy locally grown meat, artisan bread, locally roasted coffee, and farmers' market veggies.  These are the things we are used to, but in these reduced circumstances, they're simply out of our reach.  Of course I'd rather buy an organic free range chicken...  Heck, even that "free from" packet of chicken thighs is looking good these days.  But at over $2/kg more than the regular chicken thighs, it's a tough sell.

I suppose financial restriction really just forces you to choose which is more important to you.  If I was stricter with myself, perhaps I would purchase that free range chicken instead, and only have chicken every other week.

At any rate, one of our big purchases used to be our bread selection.  We are a major toast family, and plain old grocery store bread just ain't gonna cut it.  (I can't decide if that's a pun or not...)  As it turns out, making your own bread is much tastier AND more cost effective than buying the grocery store bread.  Here is my list of things that I hope will help us to live within our budget AND live well:

1) Use everything you have.  This means not letting anything go bad in the fridge, and no daily shopping trips!

2) Bake your own bread

3) Make as much as you can yourself.  Future projects include mustard, salad dressing, ketchup, lotion, sunscreen, conditioner, soap, body butter, etc. This helps you to avoid weird ingredients and hopefully will also benefit the grocery bill.  (Though some of the projects have a bit of a start-up cost for materials)

4) If you can't fit anything in your closet (dresser, piles on the bedroom floor, etc.) you don't need any more clothes.

5) Decide what you can and can't live without.  One of the things that we don't cave on is peanut butter.  Yet.  But ordinary supermarket coffee will do for now.  Besides, they don't have Transcend here. 


That's it for now.  I'll probably add to this list as I learn more about our limits and limitations!