Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Stretching Your Produce Budget Further

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Anyone who has made a simple budget has struggled with making their food budget fit with the rest of the budget.  If you attempt to eat healthy, one of the biggest components to a food budget is the produce.  Stretching your produce budget can be somewhat difficult.  Growing seasons are short, and the cost of produce keeps going up.  But, there are a few things we can do to stretch that produce budget, and make it a bit easier on your overall budget.

  1. Stretching your produce budgetStock Up on Sale: buying your produce on sale allows for you to stock up when the item is cheaper, then store it until you need it.   Canned produce is really easy to store.  Frozen only requires a freezer.  And if it’s the fresh stuff, there’s a few things you can do to store a surplus when you do pick it up in season and on sale.
  2. Canning for stockpiling: When you’ve got a surplus of produce, one of the best things you can do is can it to preserve it for another day’s use.  Canning only requires a few pieces of equipment, and a little time learning the process, then you can be off to the races filling your pantry shelves with preserved fresh produce to use later in the year when produce is much more expensive.
  3. Freeze it: Every year, around the end of summer, corn pops up in the backs of pickup trucks and in the farmers markets.  Compared to the rest of the year, it’s really cheap, and it tastes so good!  Unless we want to eat nothing but fresh corn, though, the season is fleeting, and we’re left with no other corn but the commercially canned or frozen corn you can get at the supermarket.  It’s just not the same.  Last year, we bought a whole bunch of corn (4-5 dozen), shucked them all, then cut the kernels off and combined them in a huge stockpot with some butter, a little bit of salt, and a little bit of water, and then cooked it for a little while.  Once it was done, we let it cool off, and then filled quart size freezer bags with the corn and froze it.  Now, if we want a little taste of that sweet summer corn, we just grab a bag, heat it backup and eat.  We did similar things with pumpkin, squash, zucchini, and a whole bunch of other summer fruits and veggies.  All it takes is a little bit of prep time and the freezer room to enjoy the flavor of fresh produce all year round.
  4. Grow it: If you already grow a garden every year, this might seem like a no-brainer of a tip.  But, growing your own garden can be an excellent way to stretch your produce budget out.  Last year, we enjoyed an abundance of tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onions, jalepenos, cucumbers, and even an eggplant or two from our tiny container garden.  This year, we’re planning on consolidating down to a smaller selection in hopes that we’ll have some extras that we can can as well.
  5. Find a Farmer’s Market: Buying your produce from a local farmer can often be just as cheap as buying at the supermarket.  In some cases, if you order ahead, you can get a deal on bulk orders of produce which is great if you are planning on canning any of it.  It’s also fresher since it only had to make the trip from the farm down the road instead of the farm across the country.  It’s not always a great way to stretch the produce budget, but if you want high-quality produce that will last longer before spoiling, it’s a good place to check out.
  6. Pick it Yourself: A reader on twitter commented that I’d forgotten to add the u-pick farms.  I hadn’t really forgotten them, as they just don’t exist in my neck of the woods and the cost to drive to the nearest one would negate the savings.  But, if you have a u-pick farm nearby, it’s an excellent way to get out of the house, pick a ton of fresh produce (fruits usually) and save a pretty big chunk of change.  Many of the farms only charge about 1/3 of the cost at the grocery store!

Extending your produce budget is important, not just when there are droughts, but as a way to provide healthy options for you and your family to eat year round.

What do you do to stretch your produce budget?

5 Quick Ways to Start Prepping. You’re Already Doing at Least Two of These.

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In my recent post about the state of the American economy, I told you that you didn’t need to immediately go out and become a prepper.  And you don’t.  But, much like anything else, it helps to be prepared.  You don’t have to have a bunker under your backyard, a whole armory in the bedroom closet, or enough food to feed your whole neighborhood for years.  You can, however, start making sure that you and your family have a good start in preparing for any disaster.  Here’s 5 quick ways to start prepping.  And you’re already doing at least two of these!

Stockpiling

You don’t have to have enough stockpiled to keep your family fed for months or years.  But, if there’s anything that this winter has taught much of the U.S., it’s that it’s very possible that you could find yourself stuck in one place for several days.

What should you stockpile?  Well, food is a good start.  Canned and dry goods mostly.  Beans, rice, canned vegetables (straight from the garden if you DIY), flours, grains, vacuum packed foods, and canned meats all are good staples that can go straight into your pantry and provide backup food sources should you be unable to reach a grocery store.  (also, if grocery stores cease to exist… but let’s not go all extreme just yet.)

Stockpile other goods too.  Toilet paper, pet food, matches, fire starters, medical supplies, and even ammunition if you have that armory in your closet.  Any essential that you use regularly that won’t spoil is fair game for stockpiling in case of emergency.

5 Quick ways to start prepping

Reducing Debt

If the economy crashes, do you know what the worst thing to still have is going to be?  Well, if you haven’t guessed it, that thing is debt.  If you think your hands are tied by debt now, just wait until the economy is in the dumps, you lose your job, and inflation kills your buying power.  Debt is your enemy, no matter the state of the economy.  Start with a detailed spending log where you list what you spend every day.  Knowing what you spend, and when you usually spend it, create a simple budget.  Stick to the budget, and pay down debt by whatever means necessary.  Get rid of it.  Even if the economy booms, you’ll still be better off.

Become More Sustainable

Sustainability isn’t just for hippies.  Being eco-friendly maybe attributed to the earth loving, free love, woodstock-ing people of previous generations, but today, it’s an excellent way to be healthier, and save money on costs.  There are lots of things you can do to become more sustainable.

The easiest way to start making a difference in your bottom line is to replace high energy consuming items with low energy consuming items.  LED or Incandescent light bulbs are a relatively cheap start, and last for years.  High efficiency appliances like on-demand hot water heaters are more expensive, but can save a lot on energy over the long run.  Try air drying your clothes too.  It takes a little longer, but make it a habit, and your energy savings will grow a lot.

Growing your own vegetables, installing rain barrels, and composting are also great ways to decrease your footprint, while saving yourself money.  You can replace that produce at the grocery store with home-grown veggies, use the water in your rain-barrel instead of the electrically pumped water from a well, or the municipal water, and you can save on what you put into the dump while providing nutrient rich compost for your garden.

Learn New DIY Skills

If the economy completely fails, there’s a good chance that your access to many of the services and products that you have access to now will be severely limited, or severely cost prohibitive.  Not only will learning new DIY skills (like growing vegetables, canning food, repairing items, building items (like a deck), and the list goes on) save you money by allowing you to not pay for someone else to do it, but you’ll also gain a barter-able service that you can trade for services you can’t do.

There are plenty of ways to learn new skills too.  You can just try it and see what happens, although, in my experience, doing so increases the chances that the project you’re working on will take longer or fail entirely.  If you look, you can probably find a local class that can teach you some of the skills.  Videos on YouTube and instructions on the internet (easily found through a search) are also great ways to learn something new.

Make Your Plans

We all know that we should have a plan so that everyone knows what to do should they wake up in the middle of the night to a house that’s on fire.  We give our children a plan should they get separated from us in a crowded place.  We create budgets to plan how we will spend our money, and pay down our debt.  Having a plan for an economic collapse and the conditions that could arise should it crash doesn’t cost us anything.  A little time, and some thought.  That’s it.  Do you have family that you’d “bug out” to?  Are there people in town that you’d want to help?  Are there people in town that would help you?  How will you get wherever you’re going?  Even if that’s just home?

Having a plan, and executing it if you have to is very likely to be the difference between uninterrupted life, and something far more unpleasant.

How many of these things are you already doing?  Which are you going to try out?

Original image credit:Robert Benner Sr., on Flickr.