Nine Strategies for Stretching Out a Tiny Food Budget

We’ve all faced it at some point in our life.

Your next paycheck isn’t due to arrive for a week or so. You don’t have much in your checking account and there’s not too much in the cupboards, either. You need to put food on the table for the next week but you have only a tiny amount of money.

What do you do?

In this situation, many of the usual strategies don’t work. Grow a garden? Useless; you don’t have three months to wait for food to grow. Buy in bulk? How exactly are you going to do that with an extremely limited budget?

I’ve been in this situation a few times, particularly during my college years, but even a couple of times later on. It’s hard, especially when you have family members relying on you, particularly children.

Thankfully, there are a number of short-term strategies you can use that will help you stretch a handful of dollars across a surprising number of days, keeping food on the table for your whole family. Not only are these strategies useful during these short-term pinches, they’re also useful for day-to-day life in terms of keeping your food budget low.

Let’s dig in.

Clean Out the Pantry/Cupboards

The first step you should take is to go through your pantry, cupboards, and refrigerator and take stock of everything you have. There are several reasons for doing this.

One, people often have more useful food on hand than they think. It’s easy to forget about nonperishable items stuffed in the back of the cupboard or in a corner in the pantry. It’s also easy to forget about sauces and other items in the back of the refrigerator, still good but forgotten.

Two, it gives you a chance to get rid of bad food. This is a great chance to toss highly stale, moldy, or otherwise damaged food items that you wouldn’t otherwise eat.

Three, the process often inspires meals. Every time I dig through our pantry, I find myself plotting a number of meals from the things that I pull out of the cupboard. These are meals that aren’t even remotely on my mind before I start pulling out items, but I’m simply inspired by what I find.

Four, the packages themselves sometimes inspire recipes. Many packages include simple four or five ingredient recipes that can directly inspire you to make something.

Finally, it gives you a chance to make an inventory. Often, you have more components for a meal on hand than you think you do, even if you don’t have everything. Making a big master list of all of the stuff you have on hand makes it much, much easier to plan out some meals to get you through the rest of your lean period.

Another point of advice: the sell-by date doesn’t mean the “throw it away” date. Most of those dates, particularly on non-refrigerated items, simply refer to the date by which the manufacturer will no longer vouch for the product. That does not mean it’s no longer edible or usable. Look for obvious signs of spoilage, not a sell-by date.

This pile of food should help you along the path to at least a few meals (even if it means pancakes for supper!).

Scour the Grocery Flyers

Your local grocery stores each likely issue a weekly flyer outlining the items that are on sale for that week. Sometimes, the flyer includes coupons for additional discounts.

These flyers are incredibly useful. Flyers, along with all of the food you’ve pulled out of your cupboard, can provide all that you need to plan meals until you’ve got some money in your checking account again.

First, I look for foods that have a low “price per pound.” Fresh produce and meats usually have “price per pound” listed in the flyer, like $ 1.79/lb. Look for the fruits, vegetables, and meats that can be acquired at a really low price and focus on those items. What can you do with them along with the items you already have?

Next, I look for obvious items that complete meals based on what I already have. For example, if I already have pasta sauce but no pasta, I’ll look for cheap pasta. If I already have a pancake mix that just requires a bit of milk, I’ll look for cheap milk. You get the idea.

Then, I look for items that work as standalone side dishes. Potatoes, for example, can be turned into a number of side dishes with little effort. Flash frozen vegetable bags from the freezer aisle can also add nutrition to your meal at a very low price.

Finally, I check online for coupons on the items I’ve already selected from the flyer. If I can find even a coupon or two, I’m taking advantage of “stacking” where I’m using both the sale and the coupon to really chop down the price of foods.

Ideally, I’m mostly relying on the stuff from my cupboard for meals, but the items here can really complement those items and help me to make a lot of meals.

Focus on High “Calorie Per Penny” Foods

There are some foods that not only work in a lot of different meals, but also provide a surprising amount of nutrition for just pennies. They’re often on sale, dropping their price even more, and they’re actually pretty healthy to boot.

In my experience, six foods really stand out from the pack.

Rice is incredibly cheap and filling. You can buy twenty pounds of dry long-grain rice for less than $ 9 and, upon cooking, it nearly doubles in size, meaning you’re spending about a quarter per pound of cooked rice. Rice is like a blank canvas upon which you can cook almost anything, from adding sugar and cinnamon for something sweet to adding spices for a wide variety of ethnic styles.

Dry beans offer most of the same advantages of rice in that they’re already cheap in their dry form, but more than double in mass when cooked thanks to water absorption, dropping the price right down into the fifty or sixty cents per pound range. There are many different varieties of beans that work well in so many different contexts – side dishes, soups, salads, tortilla fillings, and so on.

Oatmeal is an incredibly healthy breakfast, contributing fiber and many other nutrients to your diet, and it can be acquired well below a dollar a pound dry. Oatmeal can be supplemented with almost any fruit or sweetener to make a distinct meal and it’s an incredible way to fill yourself up in the mornings.

Eggs can be found for as low as a dollar a dozen and is likely the best source of protein on this list. Eggs are also quite flexible as they work as food on their own in many different preparations as well as an ingredient in countless other things – egg drop soup, pad thai, and on and on and on.

Sweet potatoes are, like all of the other items on this list, cheap and flexible. They’re very nutritious and can be prepared in countless different ways, easily working both as a savory and a sweet food. Sarah is a huge fan of these, so they’re regularly consumed at our house.

Peanut butter rounds out this list. Peanut butter is almost constantly on sale and, again, can be used in a variety of ways such as sandwiches, pancake toppings, or even as an element in a stir fry.

There are other known “cheap” foods like ramen noodles, but they’re unhealthy enough that you should use them sparingly. A diet of mostly ramen noodles will have health consequences.

If your grocery list is mostly full of these items and items that are on sale at the store, you’ll be getting a lot of food for very little at the store.

Make Homemade Foods

There are many foods that you might be tempted to buy at the store but you can in fact make it at home with stuff you likely already have on hand.

For example, consider a loaf of bread. If you have flour and yeast in your cupboard, water from your tap, and an oven, you can make your own bread. There are countless variations on the recipe for a humble loaf of bread, but they’re all straightforward and easy to make at home.

The ideas are endless. Turn that homemade bread into croutons by seasoning slices, cutting them into cubes, and baking them. Make corn tortillas at home out of masa flour (it’s like $ 2 for five pounds) and water. Make tortilla chips by cutting up those corn tortillas and baking them. Make refried beans by cooking beans to death in a slow cooker (with some onions, green peppers, and oil). Make potato chips by thinly slicing potatoes, tossing on some seasoning, and baking them. I could literally go on all day, but you get the idea.

Quite often, you’ll have the ingredients you need for a lot of these simple foods already in your pantry, likely purchased for other cooking experiments. Try making some things yourself and you’ll likely be shocked by how easy it is.

Shop Alone with a Grocery List Based on a Meal Plan

That simple statement breaks down into three separate pieces, so let’s look at those pieces.

Shop alone When you shop with others, you’re asking to be distracted and not focused on the task at hand, which is maximizing the value you get from every dollar you spend at the grocery store. Your kids distract you. Your spouse will, too. Your friends certainly will. If it is at all possible, you need to shop without them so you can keep your mind solely on the matter at hand.

With a grocery list You should have a grocery list in your hand that lists just the foods you need to get through until you have your paycheck. Nothing should go into your cart that isn’t on that list. In fact, you should have a pretty good idea of exactly how much you’re going to spend as soon as you walk in the door – the grocery flyer should have told you that.

Based on a meal plan That grocery list should have been generated from a meal plan, which is simply a list of the meals you intend to have until your short-term financial situation improves. That meal plan, of course, is based on the food items you already have and those found in the flyers, so your grocery list should naturally contain mostly sale items.

It’s a pretty straightforward system, one that I’ve been using for years to keep our food costs cheap. It works regardless of your situation.

Shop at the Cheapest Grocery Store

If you’re buying anything that’s not directly from the flyers, you’re going to be paying the typical store price. The way to minimize the price on those items is to shop at the store with the lowest prices.

Around here, that’s usually Aldi, though Fareway can give it a run for its money on many items. The other grocers almost always have higher prices on the whole.

How can you figure out which local grocer is the cheapest? In a pinch, you should ask your friends and coworkers that live in the area for advice. What do they think is the cheapest one? If you have a bit more time, you can price check them. Make a list of fifteen or twenty of the items you buy most often, then go to several stores and write down the price of those items. Total up the prices from each store and you’ll quickly see which one is clearly your discount grocer.

I do most of my grocery shopping at Fareway, as it balances low prices and selection. Aldi is cheaper, but sometimes their selection is sorely limited, leaving me to shop elsewhere.

Shop at the End of a Farmer’s Market

Another cheap food strategy is to shop at the end of a farmer’s market and haggle.

When you see people getting ready to pack things up at the end of a farmer’s market, go up to them and make a lowball offer on the items they still have out there. If they’re selling cabbage for $ 3 per head, make an offer of $ 1 or even $ 0.50 for that head. If they’re selling carrots for $ 2 a bundle, offer $ 0.50 for a bundle.

The problem with this strategy is that you’ll get the items that have been picked over by the other shoppers and, quite often, the item you want is already going to be sold out. However, if you’re willing to work with whatever you can get to make a tasty and nutritious meal on the cheap, you can get a good discount here.

I like to use these kinds of purchases in flexible meals. I’ll often make a stir fry out of any vegetables I can get on the cheap – and some fruits, too. I can also make soup out of virtually any set of vegetables – just toss in lots of veggies with some salt and pepper and let it simmer for a long time.

Drink Water

The water coming from your tap should be your primary source for beverages. Not bottled water, not soda, not coffee, not alcohol – tap water.

Why? Tap water is practically free. It’s just as safe as bottled water. It’s not loaded down with sugar or other substances that you don’t really need. Plus, it’s a great way to fill yourself up before a meal so you don’t overeat.

By eliminating beverages from your grocery purchases, you can save quite a bit of money and channel that savings directly into food purchases that can provide some real nutrition and calories.

Leave the soda and the tea and the coffee and the alcohol behind. Stick with water.

Check Out Community Dinners

If you’re still struggling for short-term food options, look around your community for community dinners.

Many of the churches in our area as well as some of the civic groups have a “community dinner” on a very regular schedule where people give a “free will” donation in order to enjoy a meal. If you’re strapped for cash, don’t be afraid to go there and get a great meal for a dollar.

In my experience, these meals are usually surprisingly good. They’re a great way to fill yourself – or your family – up for just a few dollars or even for free if you’re really struggling.

It’s important to remember, though, that such meals run largely on donations. It is vital that you pay back this type of giving later on when you have more money in your pocket. If you enjoy a few meals there for free or for just a dollar or two, go back later when you can drop a $ 10 or a $ 20 bill into the collection jar.

Within a twenty mile radius of our house, I was able to identify seven regularly scheduled community meals that are either entirely free or based on freewill donations. If you’re looking for meals in your area, I suggest starting with the local churches. Check their websites or give them a call to see what they have on offer.

Final Thoughts

Almost everyone struggles with putting together enough cash for a meal at some point on their financial journey. It can be a heartbreaking struggle, too, especially if you have children at home.

All of the strategies in this article are short-term strategies to help get you over that financial hump. While they certainly can help over the long term if you keep doing them – and we certainly use most of them – they’re mostly useful for just minimizing your spending this week.

A good long-term strategy for lower food costs includes other things.

Buying in bulk Buying nonperishable foods that you use all the time in a bulk purchase can save you a lot of money. If you eat rice or beans multiple times a week, buying a 20 lb. or 50 lb. bag of the stuff will save you a quarter or more per pound which adds up to a lot of savings over time.

Making meals in advance Whenever you make a meal, particularly something that’s a casserole-style meal, you can make several copies of that meal at once without adding too much time to the equation. Then, you just pop those extra versions in the freezer. When you need a meal later, you pull one out and cook it. This allows you to buy the ingredients in bulk – even relatively perishable items.

Growing a garden If you have a little patch of ground that you can cultivate, gardening can be a very inexpensive way to get quite a lot of produce. Sure, you’ll have to wait a few months to make it work, but the rewards can be tremendous. There are few things more heartwarming than having a kitchen counter completely covered in tomatoes or cucumbers (or whatever your favorite vegetable is).

At the same time, if you’re struggling to buy food, it’s likely a sign that you need to rethink your personal financial situation. You may want to consider finding additional work, even if it’s not in your current field. You may want to start looking very carefully at your current spending habits. You might also want to look at major financial changes, like moving to lower-cost housing.

This might just be a moment in your life that you can survive, but it might also be the beginning of real change in your life.

Good luck.

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Seven Clever Food Strategies for Stretching a Small Food Budget (and Nine Foods That Are Filling, Healthy, and Cheap!)

There are a lot of strategies out there for stretching a food budget, from couponing to meal planning. I’ve laid out our six-step plan for organizing cheap meals many times on The Simple Dollar, and it’s a routine we stick to almost every week.

Still, that’s not the end of the road when it comes to stretching your food budget. You can buy lots of cheap food at the store, but if it doesn’t fill you up, you’re going to constantly find reasons to snack and buy additional foods, which undoes the benefits of buying cheap food.

The best approach is to not just focus on cheap as your sole purpose in buying food. Instead, you should focus on finding a smart middle ground between cheap, healthy, and filling.

Cheap foods make sense – you want to spend as little as possible on the “food” portion of your budget.

Healthy foods make sense, too – healthier foods reduce long-term health care costs and provide some quality of life benefits.

Filling foods fall in line with “cheap” in that they reduce your desire to snack, thus reducing your food budget.

Here are seven strategies my family uses to hit this trifecta.

Eat Balanced Meals

Our family defines a “balanced meal” as one containing a roughly equal balance between carbohydrates, healthy fats, and protein. While we don’t stress out about perfectly balancing every meal, we try to balance meals across the length of a day. How do you achieve that? It’s actually pretty easy and you don’t have to stress out much about it.

The big trick is to have a diversity of foods in every meal. A meal shouldn’t be “mostly” any one thing. Instead, we try to mix it up by having some vegetables, some grains, and some proteins (milk, eggs, meats, some vegetables, etc.) in each meal. We don’t worry too much about fats, except that we try to avoid the unhealthy ones (trans fats).

Why do this? There are several reasons. For one, a mixed diet ensures you get the variety of micronutrients that you need. Plus, carbohydrates are usually cheap, but not very filling, while proteins are filling, but usually not cheap. If you balance things and have a variety of things on your plate, you can usually get a pretty filling meal without breaking the bank.

Make Each Meal Plant-Oriented

Plants are cheap and they’re healthy. If you want a healthy and inexpensive food plan for your family, you’ll base it around plants.

Our strategy is to fill more than half of our plates with fruits, vegetables, and legumes. For most meals, we’ll have a main dish along with two sides. Those sides are almost always vegetables, fruits, legumes, or rice, gently seasoned. We try to minimize what we add to those items, particularly when it comes to adding butter or cream or things like that.

In other words, we try to appreciate what the vegetables themselves taste like, not the butter or cream or salt you might add to them. Adding such things makes everything taste like everything else. If you find that you don’t like a particular vegetable, then skip it in the future. Seek out as many different vegetables as you can that you really like in their simplest form so that you don’t need to add all of that unhealthy stuff to them.

How do we do this on the cheap? We just buy what’s on sale, but buy a variety of those items. We’ll basically buy some of every raw vegetable, fruit, dried bean, plain rice, or anything similar that’s on sale that week from the flyer and we’ll plan meals around those items, using them as main dishes and sides.

If anything unusual comes on sale, we absolutely buy it. We never shy away from new things, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables, and we try to make up our minds whether we like them in their simplest form or not.

Another tip: people’s tastes change, so don’t stick to preconceived notions. When I was really little, I loved tomatoes. In my later childhood years, I absolutely hated the things. Now, I love them again. I would have never discovered this change had I not been willing to at least try tomatoes again and give them a fresh chance. Don’t decide that you don’t like something just because you didn’t like it ten or twenty years ago.

One final tip: one bad meal isn’t a disaster. If you use an ingredient to make a meal that you end up not liking, it’s just one meal. It’s not a major loss. It’s still edible and you can just avoid that item next time. Don’t be afraid to try things.

Buy Fresh Vegetables and Fruits In-Season

For us, late summer is the best time of the year. All kinds of different fruits and vegetables are in season in our area and, in a good year, farmers are looking to unload lots of produce quickly. That means bargains.

In-season fruits and vegetables are cheap and fresh. It’s easy to find in-season produce by the pound for just a few dollars. You can make a variety of meals with those items and freeze anything that you can’t use.

Even better than the cheapness is the fact that they also taste incredible. The quicker the time between picking and eating, the better vegetables taste, in my opinion. For example, I’m not a big fan of tomatoes from the grocery store, but if I pick them from our garden, I usually eat a dozen cherry tomatoes before they ever make it in the house. They just taste better.

What if things aren’t in season or aren’t on sale? In those cases, I typically buy frozen fruits and vegetables. They’re surprisingly inexpensive, are often on sale, and taste quite good. I’d far, far rather eat frozen vegetables than canned ones.

Skip Convenience Foods – Or Make Your Own

One of the big draws of the modern diet is convenience. Our time is gobbled up by other things – work, commuting, parenting responsibilities, and so on. It is often really tempting to eat meals as conveniently as possible.

Convenience foods mean you’re paying a premium for the convenience, not just the food. I look at pizza as an example of this. I can make a large pizza very similar to what can be purchased at the pizza shop nearest our house for about $ 5 in ingredients and energy. Alternately, I can spend $ 10 to $ 15 there to buy a large pizza. The difference? Convenience. It’s not even really the “time” issue, since I can pull dough from the freezer and get a pizza in the oven in about fifteen minutes and it’ll be done in fifteen minutes, but it takes 30 minutes to get that ordered pizza. It’s just more convenient to order it – but it really does cost us when we do that.

The same is true for things like hamburgers. You might be able to match the price of a homemade burger on a dollar menu somewhere, but the homemade version tastes better and is far healthier. If you keep some patties frozen in the freezer so that you can pull them out at your convenience and take them straight to the grill, it’s pretty easy to put together some hamburgers at home at your convenience. They’ll be cheap and substantially healthier than fast food fare.

If you really need the convenience, plan ahead and make your own. Our biggest tool in the war against convenience foods is to prep as much in advance as possible.

For example, I’ll make a bunch of pizza dough, wrap the balls of dough in wax paper and a freezer Ziploc, and toss them in the freezer to use in the next month. That way, when we want pizza, I can just pull out that dough and defrost it, roll it out, toss on a few ingredients, and toss it in the oven. Sometimes, I’ll even make full pizzas a day or two in advance, storing them in the refrigerator or freezer.

I’ll often make large batches of beans early in the week in the slow cooker, then use them in two or three meals throughout the week. The beans are already cooked – I just pull out the container, get a few scoops, and add them to whatever I’m making. We do a similar thing with rice, too.

You can also make pure convenience foods in advance. For example, making individually-wrapped “Hot Pockets” doesn’t take too long at all (especially if you’re making a ton at once) and they’re far cheaper than buying them (even on sale), are quite a bit healthier, and (in my opinion) tastier, too.

Have Plenty of Fiber In Your Diet

Fiber isn’t a magic bullet for maintaining a healthy body, but it is very good at making you feel full without adding calories to your diet. There is basically no downside to eating more fiber.

Get fiber by eating whole fruits and vegetables. Get some apples and bananas and eat them as snacks when you’re hungry. They’re more filling than you would expect because of the fiber. Another great strategy in this department – high fiber, relatively low calorie, thus filling you up easily – is to eat some oatmeal for breakfast.

Minimize sources of fiber outside of foods. Due to the benefits to digestive health that fiber provides, many people supplement additional fiber into their diet. There’s no reason to do this. Just choose inexpensive foods that provide plenty of fiber, like apples and oatmeal, and eat them regularly. It’s cheaper and better for you.

Stop Looking at Food as Entertainment

With all the food-related cultural material out there, it’s easy to see food as a source of entertainment, which then encourages you to spend more on it by buying exotic ingredients and eating out at expensive restaurants. Let go of that.

Focus on untying your emotions from what you eat. Food shouldn’t bring you joy. If you feel a strong sense of joy prior to eating a meal, then you need to spend some time thinking about your emotional connection to food. While it’s fine to feel joy about a special occasion – a romantic dinner at a nice restaurant or a great meal with good friends – eating around the house shouldn’t be a source of significant pleasure in your life. If it does, then your emotions are clouding your ability to make good food judgments.

If you go out to eat to “spoil yourself,” make it worthwhile. Instead of eating out regularly at lower-quality restaurants, eat at home more often, skip those restaurants, and eat out on occasion at an exceptional place. If you’re going to eat unhealthy foods, in other words, you should do it less often and be more discerning about the unhealthy foods you consume.

Use a Smarter Plate Strategy

One big challenge with adopting more filling foods (like fiber-rich foods) is that you don’t mentally adjust the amount of food you should put on your plate. It can be really tempting to just eat as much as you used to, but doing so leaves you feeling stuffed and miserable. You can fight that, though.

You don’t have to clean your plate. I was raised on the idea that a person should clean their plate of all food or else. If you didn’t do that, you were being wasteful. In reality, though, leaving behind several bites of food when your body tells you that you are full is a really good move. You might waste a quarter’s worth of food, but you’re also listening to your body. This leads directly to another valuable point.

Put less on your plate to begin with. If you listen to your body and realize that you don’t actually need to eat as much as you usually put on your plate (leaving behind several bites), you’ll start naturally putting less on your plate to begin with. I find it a much smarter strategy to just put a small amount of food on your plate and then go back for more if you assess things later and decide that you’re full.

Nine Foods That Are Healthy, Filling, and Cheap

Want some suggestions on how to fill your grocery cart? Here are nine healthy foods you’ll find all the time in our house, along with some tips on purchasing them inexpensively.

Rice isn’t as cheap as it once was, but in terms of an inexpensive way to spice up meals in many different ways, rice is a powerhouse. Colored rices – brown, black, red, or wild – are better for you, but tend to be a little more expensive. If you can find a discounted deal on bulk brown, black, red, or wild rice, that’s something you should jump for.

Rice can be used in countless ways, from the backbone of a stir fry to the key ingredient in a casserole to a flexible side dish that can be accompanied by almost any spice. We consume rice at least twice a week at our house and consider it a spectacular “bang for the buck” food option.

Beans are absolutely loaded with fiber – which means they do a good job of filling you up – and if you buy dry beans, they’re incredibly inexpensive. A cup of cooked black beans, for instance, provides 30 grams of dietary fiber while only providing 2.8 grams (4% of the daily USDA recommended value) of fat.

In terms of filling you up without breaking the bank and without putting a bunch of junk in your system, it’s pretty hard to beat beans. Plus, they fit well into so many different meals, from a side dish at a barbecue to the core of a delicious burrito.

Oatmeal provides the backbone of many breakfasts at our house. We will often put steel cut oats in a slow cooker just before bed, let them slowly cook overnight, and enjoy a great breakfast in the morning (usually with some fruits added to the oatmeal for a touch of sweetness and nutritional variety).

Oatmeal is an incredible source of fiber and fills you up wonderfully with a surprisingly low calorie count. If you can find steel cut oats at a discount price, it will be one of the best food bargains you’ll find on your grocer’s shelves.

Frozen vegetables are an item that’s on sale all the time at our local grocer. Considering you can often get a pound of vegetables for far less than a dollar, it’s an incredible deal.

Frozen vegetables are generally flash-frozen shortly after picking, so they’re reasonably fresh-tasting and preserve a lot of their nutritional value. They’re usually unseasoned, too, so they can provide a very easy basis for many, many main dishes and work very well for a quick side dish, too.

On-sale fruits and vegetables are a great counterbalance to frozen vegetables, particularly when they’re in season. They’re easier to store (as they don’t require a freezer) and often provide a variety that isn’t available in frozen form.

This is where your local store’s grocery flyer really comes in handy. Check the store’s website and see what kinds of fruits and vegetables they have on sale this week, then use those items as the backbone for a meal plan for the week. This is exactly how Sarah and I plan a week’s worth of meals.

Whole grain pasta is substantially healthier than white pasta as it retains all three parts of the grain (white pasta loses the nutrient-rich bran). It usually sells for the same price and, in my experience, tends to be more filling than white pasta due to the increased amount of fiber.

There is a bit of a texture change from white pasta, but it’s one that you quickly get used to. For me, I find that I can eat about 30% less whole grain pasta and feel just as full.

Eggs are a food that, in moderation, provides tons of wonderful protein at a very low cost. A single egg costs less than a quarter – even if you’re buying cage-free eggs – and it provides a bunch of protein for your diet.

I find that starting a day with a small bowl of oatmeal and a single poached egg is an incredibly easy way to start the day with a lot of energy and leave me feeling content with a very small lunch.

Potatoes sometimes have a poor reputation for healthiness, but that’s mostly because of the incredibly unhealthy things people do to them – frying them, converting them into chips, or slathering them with butter and cream and bacon.

Try eating a baked potato as simply as possible, with just a bit of herbs to season it with. Minimize the salt, cream, and butter and focus on enjoying the potato itself, peel and all. It’s actually quite healthy and very filling.

Tuna is another item that is incredibly cheap and quite healthy and filling when eaten in moderation. I often see sales on multi-packs of canned tuna that brings the price per ounce incredibly low.

Tuna brings some omega-3 fatty acids into your diet and can be eaten in a number of ways. As with any fish, a little is very good for you, but moderation is the key.

If You Take Away One Lesson…

… it’s that the best way to eat cheap and healthy while keeping your stomach full is to eat a variety of things, focusing on fruits, vegetables, beans, and rice, and using your grocery store’s weekly flyer as a guide.

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The Challenge of Frugality and Good Nutrition

via The Simple Dollar:

The other day, I went through a local grocery store flyer and marked items as either being “healthy” or “unhealthy.” I was curious as to whether items on sale were items that provided good long-term nutrition for people or not.

Of course, the first problem is defining what “healthy” and “unhealthy” means. Part of the challenge that people have when figuring out what foods are “good” for them and “bad” for them is that there is so much contrasting information out there.

For example, what’s better for you, skim milk or whole milk? There are reasonable arguments on both sides of that coin. In truth, it has a lot to do with what makes up the rest of your diet.

Does something have to be organic or treated in certain ways in order to be “healthy” and provide “good nutrition”? What about GMOs? You’re simply opening the door to endless arguments that simply aren’t resolvable in any satisfying way.

I think it’s generally easy to identify at least a few things that are clearly “healthy.” Fresh fruits and vegetables are pretty much healthy by anyone’s standards, as are flash-frozen fruits and vegetables.

It gets a bit harder to clearly identify which foods are “unhealthy,” because every time you make a broad statement about a category of items in the grocery store, you can find an item that can be a significant part of a healthy diet, at least by some acceptable standard.

Given all of this, it’s no wonder that people are often confused about what to eat. It gets even worse when you start looking at price as a significant factor. If money is no object, you can obviously make different dietary choices than some, but that’s not the reality for most of us.

Not surprisingly, I gave up on my grocery flyer “experiment.” It was too hard to identify each item as clearly “healthy” and “not healthy” once I got past the small number of fresh produce and frozen items that were clearly healthy.

So, how do you eat a diet that’s both nutritious and frugal? I’ve figured out five rules that, if you follow them, should point you toward a healthier diet.

Rule #1: At least half of your plate at each meal should be fruits and vegetables, minimally seasoned.

It’s pretty hard to argue that fruits and vegetables aren’t good for you, so just make them a larger part of your diet. That’s pretty easy.

This can still be cheap. Watch your grocery flyer for what’s on sale in the produce department each week and get plenty of those items. Figure out new ways to use them throughout the week.

Rule #2: Drink a big glass of water before each meal and make water your usual beverage.

If you do this, you’re not going to be as hungry during the meal because your stomach will have a bunch of water in it already. This helps tackling the big problem of portion control, which is actually the biggest enemy of all both for your health and for your wallet.

So, just before each meal, gulp down some water. You’ll find that you get full faster. That means you eat less food, which means that you have lowered food expenses.

At the same time, cut out extra beverages like soda from your diet. Get used to drinking water as your primary beverage. Water is extremely inexpensive from the tap; even if you don’t like the tap water, a water filter still makes it way cheaper than buying soda. The habit of just having something to drink on your desk easily works with water – trust me.

Rule #3: Put less food on your plate and eat it slowly.

You don’t need to put a ton of food on your plate. Try putting about half as much on your plate as you usually do. If you find that you want more when your plate is clean, get more (while sticking to the “fruit and vegetable balance”).

At the same time, eat a little slower. For me, I found it useful to start putting my silverware down on the table while chewing each bite. If I’m eating a sandwich, I put it on the plate and remove my hands while chewing. The whole purpose is to allow your body more time to signal when it’s full, which generally means you eat a little less, which generally reduces food costs.

Rule #4: Avoid any completely prepackaged meals.

If there’s one food item I would call “unhealthy,” it would be the completely prepackaged meals. If you can pop it out of the container, mix everything together, and just throw it straight in the oven, then there’s likely a bunch of junk in there that isn’t good for you. There are exceptions to this, but they’re exceptions, not the rule.

If you want the convenience of these kinds of meals, make them in advance – in fact, here’s my ultimate guide for making meals in advance. You can prepare them from basic ingredients, which makes them cheaper, and you can control what’s actually in there, which makes them (usually) healthier.

If you’re tempted by fast food, make your own versions of your favorite items. Stick them in the freezer so you can just grab them when you get home or before you leave. They’ll usually be cheaper and they’ll certainly be healthier without sacrificing taste.

Rule #5: If you’re unsure about what to buy, get the simpler version and jazz it up yourself.

If you have the option of getting seasoned or unseasoned meat, get the unseasoned meat and flavor it yourself. Buy the plain yogurt and add fruit yourself (this lets you buy one big container instead of several small ones, too). Buy plain bread and add garlic yourself.

This way, you have more control over what goes into the product. You never have perfect control, of course, but simply choosing to add things yourself instead of trusting food additives is almost always a good idea. Plus, it’s usually cheaper – compare the prices of an ordinary loaf of bread and a loaf of garlic bread in the bakery sometime, for example.

If you manage to follow the ideas here, you’re probably eating a reasonably frugal and reasonably healthy diet. You’re doing good, so don’t stress out about finding the “perfect” food or the “perfect” diet. Don’t cut out all of the foods you like. Don’t get obsessed with nuances.

These little changes will almost always reduce your food spending while also improving the quality of your diet.

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Personal Finance, food, frugality, insurance

Farm business advisors deliver products and profits to Cambodia’s rural farmers

When Cambodian farmers buy fertilizer and seeds, they can also get helpful advice about how to increase production and gain better access to reliable markets to sell their crops.It’s all part of a bundled package that provides farming necessities and technical know-how to smallholder farmers through a business model designed to boost incomes, share knowledge and create value at each step of the supply chain.Lors Thmey, which means ‘new growth’ in Khmer, teaches local entrepreneurs to become farm business advisors. That means that in addition to selling products to farmers, they’re trained to be consultants, too. Their clients, rural farmers, pay them for supplies, like seeds, fertilizers, shade screens and drip piping, and advice and information on everything from weather patterns to soil care …

via Global Envision:

Image:

When Cambodian farmers buy fertilizer and seeds, they can also get helpful advice about how to increase production and gain better access to reliable markets to sell their crops.

It’s all part of a bundled package that provides farming necessities and technical know-how to smallholder farmers through a business model designed to boost incomes, share knowledge and create value at each step of the supply chain.

Lors Thmey, which means ‘new growth’ in Khmer, teaches local entrepreneurs to become farm business advisors. That means that in addition to selling products to farmers, they’re trained to be consultants, too. Their clients, rural farmers, pay them for supplies, like seeds, fertilizers, shade screens and drip piping, and advice and information on everything from weather patterns to soil care to up-to-date market pricing. As a result, farmers produce better crops and make more money, and the FBAs expand their businesses and boost their incomes, too.

The micro-franchise model of Lors Thmey was started in 2005 by iDE, an international organization with a mission to improve livelihoods for rural households. Recognizing that rural farmers were missing out on opportunities to make more money because they lacked quality inputs, irrigation supplies, credit, agronomic know-how and current market information, iDE saw an opportunity to create a profitable business with tangible benefits for its clients, as well.

“The core offerings of the business should create social value,” said Michael Roberts, the Cambodia country director for iDE.

And, Roberts pointed out, very small improvements can create a lot of value for Cambodia’s farmers. “Because it’s relatively easy to get the gains, that’s a great opportunity for social business,” he said.

That’s what farmer are seeing, too. For less than $50 per year, Lors Thmey’s 14,000 clients earn, on average, $250, a return of five times their initial investment.

“It’s much easier to make enough money now than it was before,” said Siey Mai, who farms rice, beans, tomatoes and melons on a plot of land that has been in her family for generations.

Even as prices for seeds and other supplies increase, Mai and her family have seen their profits grow faster than their costs in the two years that they’ve been working with a local advisor who has a Lors Thmey franchise. “He comes to the farm to teach us little things, like how to use plastic to keep the land soft,” she explained. “With softer land, we grow better food and sell more crops.”

Another benefit of working with the advisors is that farmers can keep working instead of traveling to distant markets to sell their crops.

“Now customers come right to the house to buy our food,” Mai said. “They know what we grow, and they like it, so we know people will come here to buy it.”

That’s because the advisors know what their clients are growing, and help to spread the word in local communities. While some crops still are sold in central markets, farmers like Mai now can trust information they get about current market prices and are more comfortable selling from home. And it’s in the advisors’ interest to advertise their clients’ products well: The more the farmers earn selling crops, the more they invest in additional inputs and advice, meaning better business up the supply chain.

The franchise model generates income at three different points along the supply chain of agricultural production. Small-scale farmers, half of whom are from the poorest third of the Cambodian population, earn higher incomes through use of quality supplies and up-to-date methods. As independent entrepreneurs, advisors earn margins on the sale of products and build their customer base by providing advice that works. And Lors Thmey turns a profit selling products to its franchises, as it continues to build and support the advisor network throughout the country.

Business is growing for Lors Thmey, which currently operates as a separate for-profit business within iDE’s operations in Cambodia. Active in five provinces and expanding into three more, Lors Thmey aims to employ 400 FBAs and be entirely self-financing within two more years.

Lors Thmey capitalizes on using the market to sell knowledge, as well as physical goods. “You can’t donate people out of poverty,” Roberts said.

“The only thing that’s given free in this project is training to the [advisors]. The small farmers need to invest in the seeds, fertilizer and irrigation equipment. But it’s still able to reach very poor households, because the minimum investment is actually very small.”

And, according to farmers, the investment is worth it.

Read more stories from the field with farm business advisors and their clients.

Author Erik Mandell visited Lors Thmey in Cambodia with Portland State's Impact Entrepreneurs program.

Watch this video about iDE’s Farm Business Advisor program in Cambodia, made as part of Nestle’s Creating Shared Value Prize:

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Resources:

iDE Cambodia

Lors Thmey Project Description

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Global Envision

Farm business advisors deliver products and profits to Cambodia’s rural farmers

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Social Entrepeneurship, business, cambodia, cambodian, clients, food, investment, poverty, thmey

The Slow Cooker Lunch Cycle

This website is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Material shared on this blog does not constitute financial advice nor is it offered as such. Therefore, The Simple Dollar assumes no legal liability for the completeness, accuracy, or suitability of the information provided by its authors.Readers will also note that The Simple Dollar maintains financial relationships with certain third party merchants. If readers access and utilize the services of one of these affiliates through a link on the blog, The Simple Dollar may be compensated for the referral.Please read the blog’s policies on privacy and image-use.And always consult a locally licensed insurance agent, financial adviser or certified attorney before making any financial decisions.

via The Simple Dollar:

It’s pretty easy to understand the desire to eat out in the middle of a workday. It can be really inconvenient to prepare a meal before you go to work, after all, and many of the meals you can throw together in a minute in the morning are pretty bland.

The problem is that eating out for lunch can be expensive, even if you eat at an inexpensive place every time. If you spend only $5 on lunch – and that’s a pretty cheap lunch when eating out – that’s $25 a week.

That leaves us with the idea of taking leftovers to work, which is something that people often don’t like to do because it means eating more of what you already had the night before (or the night before that).

Thankfully, there’s a pretty simple approach that solves all of these problems. All you need is a slow cooker and a small pile of freezer-ready resealable and reusable dishes. One good solution is to just buy a bunch of them in bulk, like this set of 50 containers for $18.

All you have to do is turn on your slow cooker on a Saturday or Sunday morning, toss in the ingredients for a particular slow cooker recipe, and let it cook all day long. If you wish to have that food for dinner that night, you can do so, but it’s entirely up to you.

When the food is done cooking, simply fill up as many containers as you can with whatever you prepared. Then, on each container, stick a piece of masking tape. On that masking tape, write what the food is and the date you prepared it.

Then, just stick all of the filled containers in the freezer.

Each week, do this with a different recipe. One week, you might make chili. Another week, make beef stew. Another week, make slow cooker lasagna. Another week, make chicken tortilla soup. Just find recipes that sound good to you (and, ideally, recipes that revolve around ingredients that are on sale at the store that week).

Each day, before you go to work, just open the freezer door, grab a container, and take it with you. Put it in the fridge at work so that it will thaw a bit in the morning, then microwave it and enjoy a warm lunch that’s not just a repeat of what you’ve had recently.

During the first few weeks, you won’t have many options in the freezer, but by the third or fourth week, you’ll open the freezer door and see containers of several different types. You’ll be able to choose between three or four or five different meals for lunch each time you open the door, so you won’t have to repeat the same thing over and over again.

(One good way to get started is to do two batches of food on the first two or three weekends, then cut back to one batch every weekend or every other weekend as needed.)

Not only that, if you’re making a slow cooker meal at home, the cost per meal is going to be relatively low unless you’re intentionally choosing recipes with expensive ingredients. This makes lunches quite cheap.

If you don’t eat lunches in the workplace, this is still a good idea because it can provide convenience meals for you. You can just open up the freezer, grab the meal you want, and heat it up to have a low-cost, tasty, homemade meal.

One tip: you should generally eat these meals within two months of freezing them. The longer you let them sit in the freezer, the more likely they are to get “freezer burn,” reducing their quality. Meals are generally still edible after the two month period, but they’re best if you eat them within a reasonable time frame.

This simple method makes eating a homemade lunch significantly easier, and since homemade lunches are often far less expensive than eating out, this can be a powerful money saver for busy people.

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Personal Finance, adviser-or-certified, completeness, dollar, food, frugality, insurance, king, referral, simple, simple-dollar, that-the-simple, the-simple

Four Little Habits That Have Helped Me Immensely in My Personal Finance Journey

This website is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Material shared on this blog does not constitute financial advice nor is it offered as such. Therefore, The Simple Dollar assumes no legal liability for the completeness, accuracy, or suitability of the information provided by its authors.Readers will also note that The Simple Dollar maintains financial relationships with certain third party merchants. If readers access and utilize the services of one of these affiliates through a link on the blog, The Simple Dollar may be compensated for the referral.Please read the blog’s policies on privacy and image-use.And always consult a locally licensed insurance agent, financial adviser or certified attorney before making any financial decisions.

via The Simple Dollar:

In 2006, my life was a financial mess. I had credit card debt, student loan debt, and a car loan, and Sarah was in the same exact boat. We lived in a tiny apartment with no real hope of moving elsewhere.

By the end of 2011, we owned our own home and were completely debt free.

Naturally, such a turnaround took a lot of work and a lot of hard choices, but I’ve found that the biggest difference came from lots of little skills and decisions that, over time, made a huge difference in my life.

These skills didn’t appear overnight. Instead, they were grown over a period of months – even years. Eventually, they led to what I would call a “new normal” – a new “default” way of doing things in my life that relied on these skills.

I could write about lots of these little skills or habits. Here are four of the most powerful ones.

I can estimate my grocery spending with frightening accuracy

When I first started paying attention to our food budget, I quickly realized that I had little sense abut what I was putting into my cart. I was usually completely surprised by the amount I owed at the checkout, but I’d forget about that bill almost as soon as I left the store.

This approach made it extremely difficult to maintain a monthly food budget for our family. I really had no clue what I was spending, so it was all a mystery to me.

The first step for fixing this was to use a grocery list and to keep careful track of all of the prices on items as I picked them out. After a while, I began to get a strong sense of what various items cost and, eventually, I just started to keep a running tally in my head.

That running tally really helps me keep a grip on my grocery spending. I know our total food budget for the month and because I’m able to keep a running tally, I have a strong sense as to whether my purchases are in line with that budget. That sense keeps me from buying frivolous things, but it also helps me decide whether to buy “premium” versions of particular items.

How do you learn this technique? For me, it was mostly a matter of paying attention to the price of everything I put into the cart and keeping a running tally of the cost, rounded to the nearest dollar. Almost always, the total I have in my head is pretty close to what my total is at the checkout.

I can convince myself not to buy things, even after I have them in hand (or in the cart)

I’ve talked abut the “ten second rule” many times in the past. It’s an incredibly useful technique for keeping yourself from making unnecessary purchases.

Whenever I have an item in hand that’s not an absolute need, I spend ten seconds asking myself whether or not I need that item. If I can’t justify it, I put the item back and wait on that purchase.

At first, the “ten second rule” was something I had to actively remind myself to do, but as the rule became a normal part of my life, unconsciously executing the “ten second rule” became a normal part of every purchase. It’s a learned skill, but one that does a great job of keeping you from buying unnecessary stuff.

I find a lot of pleasure in ordinary, free things

Again, this was a learned skill, not something that came naturally to me. I used to spend hundreds of dollars a month on entertainment expenses, but I’ve gradually reduced that down to a pretty small monthly number.

The big difference was that I began to appreciate quite a few low-cost and free activities. For me, the big one was reading – I started really utilizing the library in our town as well as free and low-cost e-books for my Kindle. I also cultivated interests in cooking and gardening, both of which were either very low cost or actually saved us money. I also became much more involved in community activities.

For me, the big shift happened when I started looking deeply at the financial cost of anything I might be doing in my free time. If I was considering a high-cost activity, I’d keep searching for something I would enjoy that costs less. Now, this process is completely natural and I often choose free or low-cost activities by default.

I have a very strong “need versus want” filter

In the past, when I thought about a non-required purchase, I wouldn’t really think about it as a “need” versus a “want.” My focus was mostly on the short-term pleasure boost I would get from buying something.

Today, when I make a purchase, the first thing I ask myself is whether my family needs this item. If it’s not a need, it’s going to come out of my monthly entertainment allowance.

Over time, I’ve taught myself to be very harsh when it comes to that question. The vast majority of things I would spend my money on in my life are wants, not needs. Television is a want. Internet access would be a want if it were not a business expense for me. A cell phone is a want. Most things in the store that aren’t on my list are pure wants.

Knowing that so much of what I could be spending money on is nothing more than wants makes it easier to keep that spending under control. I just keep in mind that incidental expenses are virtually always wants – and most of the time, that’s enough to get me to walk away from them.

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Personal Finance, adviser-or-certified, attention, cart, debt, food, simple-dollar, student, track

Tomales Bay Oysters – An Unforgettable Meal at Everyday Prices

Tomales Bay Oysters – An Unforgettable Meal at Everyday Prices

via My Money Blog:

Not to turn this into a food blog, but talking about The French Laundry reminded me of another awesome Northern Californian meal you could have at a mere fraction of the cost.

Both the Tomales Bay Oyster Company and the Hog Island Oyster Company have farms located by the ocean about an hour north of San Francisco. Anyone can drive up and shuck live oysters that were harvested hours ago just a few feet away. Sit on wooden picnic tables and save money by bringing everything else yourself for a gourmet picnic – shucking knives, lemon, wine, crusty bread, cheese, and so on. Eat them raw or cook them on provided grills. A dozen oysters costs $10-$20 depending on size and type. A comparable meal at a restaurant would cost more than twice as much and wouldn’t be as fresh.

These were the best oysters that I’ve ever had at any price!

I’m trying to think of similar opportunities where you can get the highest-quality ingredients without the white tablecloth, do some of the work yourself, and enjoy an unbeatable meal for the cost of a chain restaurant. When I was younger, we used to catch crabs using chicken necks and a net. Hunting your own meat and fishing also come to mind, although those require a bit more equipment and skill.

Here’s a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” found in a recent Yelp review that will make oyster-lovers salivate.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

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Personal Finance, eating out, food, frugal living, travel