When I decided to take on the task of eating on $4 a day for a week, I knew I would need some help. I turned to Iowa State and a great lady named Peggy Martin. She kicked my butt into high gear and made the impossible POSSIBLE!
I learned the first step to sticking to a budget when going to the grocery store is PLANNING! Peggy and I went through the ads of every grocery store in the Des Moines area, this is important because some stores will match competitors prices and then you can use other stores ads to really get the best price! I also learned picking the grocery store is important too. Peggy just blogged about this but a consumer report showed in our area, Fareway was the store for us, it was close, had the most competitive prices and they would honor competitors special prices.
So after about an hour of planning out our grocery list and what meals I would make for a week, we headed to the store to try to achieve 21 meals for $28 bucks.
Some tips I picked up at the store were if you need to buy chicken don’t go with the chicken breasts. Although, it is the least amount of work, I bought a whole chicken for $3.14! That will help me make three meals during this week. Another tip was for my pork fajita meal I bought pork chop with the bone in. This again is more work, but if you’re cutting the pork into strips for pork fajita anyway why not save the money.
Other tips, store brands are usually just as good as name brands and so much more affordable. For example, I got stewed canned tomatoes for a meal I’m making, the Fareway brand was .79 cents and the name brand $1.89 if I can remember correctly. That is crazy, how can the difference be over a dollar for canned tomatoes.
I also was skeptical I would be able to eat balanced compete meals, but that goes back to planning.
When it came to the BIG check-out Peggy was confident we would make our mark, I had some items at the front of the cart that were items I could remove should I need too. I ended up taking off one onion and a bag of shredded cheese (which I will miss a lot) the grand total….$28.28. AWWWWW….over by 28 cents, you got to be joking! I was going to take off 1 red potato but I felt that was more work, and is 28 cents that bad. I still see this as an accomplishment.
Tomorrow is day 1 of eating on only what I purchase.
$4 A Day Challenge 