Frugal Friday
Aug. 29th, 2025 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.Rule #1: this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc. I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.
Rule #2: this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.
Rule #3: please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about. Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.
Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.
Rule #5: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm.
With that said, have at it!
Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-08-29 06:09 pm (UTC)So, Frugal Friday Family, do you think it’s possible to live on $800 for a year for two people without animals or gardening? Is $800 a year for two people feasible in your neck of the woods or is it click bait? Is anyone willing to share what they spend on month feeding themselves and their family?
I’ll go first. My husband and I have two to three meals a day. We feed our toddler granddaughters dinner three nights a week. Our sons have breakfast with us 4-6 days a week. We garden. We have layer hens. I often buy Asian products. I do have a full pantry, freezer and fridge. We eat meat. We cook 99.9% of our meals at home. We spend around $300-500 a month for food. Some of this expense is stockpiled in the pantry or freezer. We eat well. I enjoy cooking. Whether it’s a simple or elaborate meal, eating is a pleasure in our family. (We also have no debt and can afford our grocery bills.)
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-08-29 09:14 pm (UTC)I can stretch meals, but only just so far as I don't want to compromise my health. I find it hard to believe this woman can feed both herself and her husband on about $800 a year no matter how much cheapie food she gets. Not unless she's cutting corners by raiding church food pantries and peoples' gardens when they're not looking. Yeah, weekly that works out to about $15 which doesn't really buy that much unless you get a lot of fillers like crackers, pasta as well as Campbell's watered-down soup. So, I agree, my BS detector is buzzing too.
JLfromNH/Indigo Hibernating Flea
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-08-30 02:34 am (UTC)The $800. annually for two is doable, but I question the health effects. Loss leaders might be healthy but more often they are not. Also, I can find better things to do than make every other day trips to grocery stores.
A good trick if you can't afford vegetables, or your garden is not yet producing is to try to have onions and lemons on hand. Both are highly nourishing items which can improve the taste of almost any dish. Mary Bennett
it is possible
Date: 2025-08-31 08:14 am (UTC)I agree with Mary. Particularly if you have access to church food pantries (how is that cheating? - it is part of being frugal), where in my town you can usually get free bread, fruit and vegetables, with other pantry staples like oats and tinned soup or stew being sold at quite low prices including packaged Asian style 2-minute noodle soups. People with gardens bring in their surplus so some very fresh fruit, herbs and vegetables are also available at times.
I used to live in rental accommodation on unemployment benefits and those noodle soups were a staple for me. Add some spinach and a mushroom or two and you have a reasonably tasty meal with a bit of nutrition for a dollar or so. I was vegetarian and wouldn't have been able to do labouring on that diet though. It wouldn't have been called eating well but it kept me alive. And eating meat is normally much more expensive. Even then, one local store sells bulk cuts of meat at a very low per unit price, then discounts when the expiry date approaches, so cooking and freezing judiciously would also allow a bit of meat in the diet and keep the relative cost near that of lentils or flour.
Re: it is possible
Date: 2025-09-01 12:53 am (UTC)Atmospheric RIver
Re: it is possible
Date: 2025-09-02 06:43 pm (UTC)is/ought
Date: 2025-09-03 01:08 am (UTC)Are we even having the same discussion here?
OP asked, "do you think it's possible?" and 2 of us said we thought so. Whether it is ethically legitimate was not the question.
Food banks, like so many charity enterprises, are not the same the world over. In my state the "food bank" distributor organization is donated the goods by the big shops but sells them on to the church charities which hence can't practically give them all away. The churches also bear the cost of freight from the depot to their sites. Thus the more a church sells the more profit the church makes to do other good works (such as giving away food packages). So that supporting the food pantry by shopping there is in fact assisting those in more need.
Re: is/ought
Date: 2025-09-03 02:37 am (UTC)So a church distribution site here is indeed buying the food from the food bank distributer. But the food bank distributer is mostly buying the food from the USDA. ANd this is limited, the USDA does not have enough in the pipeline to just have every American buy it from them at their low prices.
YOu must live in an area without much need if food donated, or sold, from actual local stores, is more than enough for the give away food packages so that there is extra for people wantimg to save money are also buying it.
I have a feeling that alot of what they have is USDA foods and they are passing it along to the poor but not all the way indigant who can help out by paying what they ahve to pay USDA.
They also have some kind of deal with the Raleys supermarket brand and sometimes other name brands,
Atmospheric RIver
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-08-30 02:55 pm (UTC)I know how much I budget for groceries, but that's a very different category: it includes toilet paper, etc, and the government's cut.
Now, I have a bunch of men around, and they do a lot of heavy labor, and consume accordingly, so if I wanted to produce a very click-baity sort of production, I think I'd look for a couple older folks who aren't very physically active, and get them to be my subjects for this sort of production.
Which is to say, there are a whole bunch of factors both mathmatical and lifestyle to play with and manipulate to get a "I spend only $X a year!" article.
At a rough estimate, we're probably double that. But . . . five men from 17-50 over 6' tall who are all doing physical labor.
There's only one store in town that has good enough loss leaders to bother with tracking their sales. Mostly I buy as much bulk as I can. A fifty pound bag of whole wheat flour currently lasts under a month.
BoysMom, currently considering how many cups of dry pinto beans to soak for future refried beans.
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-08-30 11:27 pm (UTC)The USDA calculates food plan prices, these are a national average or something as I know you cant buy what they think you can on that amount of money in my area, but you can absolutely eat on the amount of their budget even in this area.
The lowest price food plan they call the thrifty food plan, and for a woman in my age range they say you can eat their basket of healthy food for $53/week. since I have a garden and fruit trees and can I spend less than that. A young male would be $73/week. https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-files/cnpp-CostFood-TFP-March2025.pdf
They also have moderate and liberal food plans. So if you wonder how your spending compares, you can start by looking at their data if you want. They also have a report which shows what foods they base this in, so what groceries they think you can buy for that amount a month to have a healthy diet.
Table A4 at the end of the report shows how much and what amounts of each category they think you shoul d be buying a week Page 114 for me. https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/thrifty-food-plan-2021. That is from 2021, so they have raised the amount per week now to $53/week when then it was $44/week but the chart has not been updated. (Somewhere else is the place where they show what specific foods they used to determine the prices, like xpound of chicken, I dont want to try and find that right now, so I will approximate below)
I am going to round off and pick a few things, but think about it as a woman my age each week having 1 gallon of milk, 2 ounces of cheese, a quart of yogurt, half a dozen eggs, 1/2 pound hamburger, 1 1/2 pound chicken, 8 ounce can salmon or tuna, 1/2 jar peanut butter, 1 pound dried lentils/beans, 1 loaf bread, 1 pound rice, 3 cups rolled oats, 1 pint fruit juice, 5 pounds fruit ( the cheaper ones, apple/oranges/banana), a bunch of kale, 1 pound of carrots, 1/2 pound tomatoes, 1/4 pound red bell pepper, 2 pounds of potatoes, 1.4 pounds other vegetable, and $5 left to buy butter/oil, condiments, tea, jam or anything else. So maybe 1 stick butter, black tea bags, some oil, spices, a little sugar. Maybe buy flour instead of bread to make a loaf and then have flour to bake other things.
Seems to me there is alot of milk in that and not enough grains or cheese. Of course cheese is expensive and this is the thrifty food plan. So, if you are a woman over 50 and can buy that in your area for $53 they feel you will meet your calorie and nutrient needs. But it is a government example to show how you can eat healthy on that amount of money and is the food plan they base food stamps on.
Atmospheric RIver
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-08-31 07:54 pm (UTC)In 2025 through July we have averaged $357/month spent on food purchased from grocery stores, farmers markets, local ranchers, and the Frontier food co-op. We are omnivores and eat eggs and meat daily; the monthly food cost reflects that, but we eat little beef and a lot more pork because pork is relatively cheap in the lower Midwest where we live. I garden but the garden isn't as large as it used to be, and neighborhood deer have eaten freely from it since about mid-June. I did get a good yield of lettuce, bok choy, and collards out of it before the deer found it, and we bought almost no fruit in the past year, instead eating from the stock of frozen pawpaws and persimmons from last year's bountiful crops.
No question, we could significantly reduce the cost of the food that we buy by eating less meat and re-implementing the strategies Amy Dacyczyn discusses in the Tightwad Gazette. We used those strategies from the mid 1990s until about 10 years ago, when we started receiving our pensions and my husband started receiving Social Security, raising our monthly income so that we could choose quality over quantity of food. But I cannot imagine reducing costs enough for the two of us to feed ourselves on $800/year. Even if we dropped our current food bill by half, which if possible would be at a significant loss in quality of the food we eat compared to now, we'd eat up $800 before the year was half out.
Re: Food Costs (and a small answer rant)
Date: 2025-08-31 09:29 pm (UTC)At the time Jacob L. Fisker had a year-spending of 7000 Dollar with 150 Dollar/ month for two people and a dog. In one of the forum-posts IIRC he mentioned that he cooks one big batch of rice+vegetables and eats from it three days, at which point SO cooks something different out of sheer wanting something different.
https://earlyretirementextreme.com/frequently-asked-questions
Over here I talked to many people about this site, the usual reaction was disbelief coupled with an idea that it-cannot-be-done-end-of-sentence.
From all the people I talked to only three (including me) were busy implementing what was said there. Only one suceeded (more or less, he´s still working but financially and resilienty fit) and even he liked the mr. moneymustache site better.
From this tiny group and how the earl-retirement site rolls, I´m left wondering if the early-retirement approach (saving 70% of income for 5 years) might be most suitable for (*and no disrepect meant*) a) people with an autistic/independent undercurrent and/or b) people who are into finance-like things already.
The two other people stumbled over responsibility questions (e.g. if I don´t buy "green" then "green" products might disappear) and too little financial clue.
Before I fell off the bandwaggon I was at approx. 25% saving. I might have to crawl back on again and close a circle.
Best wishes, Emily07
Re: Food Costs (and a small answer rant)
Date: 2025-09-01 01:51 am (UTC)I came away with the idea that the best course is the one that works for your situation. The more you can save relative to spending, the better you'll be. Few will be able to live on $7k a year, or even double that these days, but it's still worth seeing how low you can get it within tolerances.
Re: Food Costs (and a small answer rant)
Date: 2025-09-01 02:29 pm (UTC)at the moment, I dont know of a site that is kept up or has current pricing or current links.
The thing that is hard about the older sites, and specifically about the food budgets is that even though we know food has gone up in price, we dont have a sense on how to adjust what they are posting. SO, I dont know when earlyretirement extreme posted, what year, to know how to adjust the food prices. Could be up 50% now from then. ANd, I think someone can temporarily spend quite low, but for health is the issue, did they calculate the nutrients they should have been having. I also think it IS valuable to know how to eat very cheap temporarily to dig oneself out of a hole, to not get evicted that month or to make it while looking for a new job or in line with what they did, to save up money for a goal. But for long term we also need to make sure we eat for good health.
Atmospheric River
Re: Food Costs (and a small answer rant)
Date: 2025-09-03 05:11 pm (UTC)This is far more important to my partner and I than eating on the cheap. We buy in bulk and watch for sales to stock up, but we try not to compromise on quality.
Caldathras
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-09-01 01:06 am (UTC)Lathechuck
Re: Food Costs (and a small rant)
Date: 2025-09-01 06:15 pm (UTC)Also, I now see why milk features highly in the US Government's Thrifty food plan, it is nutrients per dollar.
1/2 pound wheat flour (.25)
1 quart milk ( .90)
1 egg ( 8 per week actual) ( .30 in California)
1/2 cup chopped kale ( 1 ounce) ( .14, one ounce frozen)
1/4 pound dry pinto beans ( 1/2 cup dry, about 1.5 cups cooked) ( .21)
1 pound potatoes ( .64)
There are no discount stores by me, but if you lived one county over by a walmart, the price for that daily would be $2.30 plus kale, so about $2.44 if using frozen kale walmart brand. So a 63% increase in price since 2020, the 5 years.
anyway, based on this I can see that inflation realy does change his dollar amount calculations. So, yes, he has great frugal ideas and recipes, but it is not going to come out to the same price point as when he wrote it like all the other web sites with dollar amount frugal ideas. SO dont be too hard on yourself, food inflation is very real.
Atmospheric River
Grocery Markdown Divebombing
Date: 2025-08-29 08:09 pm (UTC)I've recently moved to a home where the local grocery store is right down the street. It takes maybe three minutes (or less)to get there on foot. One of the first things I did when I arrived in town was scoping out the store's clearance sections.
It turns out that the market has several areas for clearance items, and I've had a fun time treasure hunting. I was particularly proud of the 9lb bone-in ham that I got for $4.50, and the store regularly sells its unpurchased rotisserie chickens for $2 and sliced deli meat for half (or even less) of its retail price. The chickens are wonderful, as I can remove the meat, save the carcass for stock, and then add seasoning and veggies (cabbage is a particular favorite) to the shredded chicken, which is then cooked, packed into storage containers, and frozen for future consumption.
(Another thing I've learned is that clearance prices are printed on a large, bright yellow label, making the deals easy to spot, even if they aren't in a clearance case.)
Other consumer products are also regularly relegated to the clearance section, including batteries, cat litter, candles, coffee, etc. Often, I can pair clearance prices with coupons or cash-back offers for additional savings.
The trick with the clearance strategy is simply knowing where to look and looking frequently!
Re: Grocery Markdown Divebombing
Date: 2025-09-03 05:21 pm (UTC)The loss of all those wonderful carcasses that could be used for stock/broth is what troubles me. If they made in-house soups, that would be great ... but, AFAIK, they don't.
Caldathras
Re: Grocery Markdown Divebombing
Date: 2025-09-04 04:45 am (UTC)Crazy times.
The shocking food waste at Dear Son's job
Date: 2025-08-30 04:58 pm (UTC)He drives in several days a week, working from home the other two days.
Mega Accounting Corporation hosts hundreds of people at their site, many of them Indian expats so Dear Son is learning all about the incredible diversity of Indian cooking at catered events.
The catering is the point. Mega Accounting Corporation routinely has caterers come in and provide vast arrays of food, much of it beef (not seen as often), chicken, shrimp, and so forth. It's not all vegetarian, it's not always Indian, and it doesn't necessarily conform to various dietary restrictions.
According to company rules, leftovers MUST be refrigerated within two hours or be thrown out.
What's more, the packed trays of food filling the company fridges are routinely thrown out!
Dear Son just brought home a selection of seasoned beef tips with potatoes, seasoned roast chicken, and salad over rice. The shrimp usually disappears quickly. The other proteins are left for the janitors and office ladies to toss on Friday afternoon (or maybe take home. He doesn't know.)
We discussed this. I asked Dear Son to bring home any and all leftovers. We'll eat them! And we'll lower our own food bills and reduce the waste stream.
What would you do?
He says the waste is unbelievable, but then, we've always been thrifty with food so he's not used to throwing away anything edible.
Re: The shocking food waste at Dear Son's job
Date: 2025-08-30 10:52 pm (UTC)Re: The shocking food waste at Dear Son's job
Date: 2025-08-30 11:04 pm (UTC)Re: The shocking food waste at Dear Son's job
Date: 2025-08-31 12:54 am (UTC)Re: The shocking food waste at Dear Son's job
Date: 2025-09-03 05:34 pm (UTC)Besides, we can always take it as a treat for our dogs or livestock (chickens), particularly if it no longer looks palatable for human consumption. And we do!
Caldathras
Crispy Rice
Date: 2025-08-30 05:12 pm (UTC)I found crispy rice to be a great alternative after a few days. If you search this there are recipes and times but the two methods seem to be
1-put oil down in a cast iron pan, add rice, cook, don't stir
2- sheet pan method - what I use. Put rice on sheet pan, pour on some oil and bake at high heat until desired crispiness turning once or twice. Sometimes I broil briefly to get it very crispy. Then I serve with some kind of stew or stir fry.
It definitely makes leftover rice a lot more exciting for the cost of a few tablespoons of oil.
Re: Crispy Rice
Date: 2025-08-30 07:29 pm (UTC)My alternative approach is to use a very small Japanese-style rice cooker -- the kind that can cook at most a two-person batch of rice. (Dash is the brand I happen to use.) It uses only a tiny amount of electricity, and gets me my breakfast rice fresh and piping hot every morning.
Re: Crispy Rice
Date: 2025-08-30 10:57 pm (UTC)HL is expanding their fabric offerings in the wake of the closure of Joann. No woolens or silk yet, alas, but some not bad linen and cotton/linen bolts.
Re: Crispy Rice
Date: 2025-08-30 11:24 pm (UTC)Re: Crispy Rice
Date: 2025-09-03 05:44 pm (UTC)It sounds like your recipe is taking the process just a step further.
Caldathras
Real inflation
Date: 2025-08-31 09:18 pm (UTC)That is a 20% increase in food prices for their very basic basket of foods, which is no surprise to all of us out shopping.
This rate of inflation is double what the Social Security annual increase is and is also above what many get in annual percent raises based on inflation ( so without a step or promotional increase)
Housing, electricity and healthcare have increased more than 20% over 4 years.
So the governments own data does show the inflation, they just dont use the real data, most likely as the money is not there to pay out the real needed amounts, and also most likely it sounds better to say that inflation is only 2.5 or 2.7% -- dont believe your lyin eyes
Ice cream and Georgette Hayer
Date: 2025-09-01 05:02 am (UTC)I love ice cream but I am allergic to dairy products and find sugar to be very hard on me. So, I make my own ice cream. I put a can of coconut milk in the blender and drop in frozen strawberries or other berries from our garden. I add the fruit a bit at a time and also add a bit of stevia and vanilla. When I have added enough fruit to get a nice texture, I taste and adjust. I have to push the mixture around a bit with a spatula, turning the blender off to do so. This gives me excellent sugar and dairy-fee ice cream for a fraction of the price it would cost in the store and I know all the fruit was produced using clean, organic methods.
I heard about Georgette Hayer here and bought a used copy of, "Cotillion," for $6 Canadian which is almost nothing. I found the novel to be charming, funny and full of interest. I read it in two days and two days of entertainment for $6 is pretty good.
Maxine