Living Below The Line

Earlier this month, I saw an email in my inbox about living for less than $1.50 a day. I didn't look into it to much, but mentioned it to Benedick. He had gone 2 1/2 weeks in college, living on just $1 a day. That was almost 10 years ago. He rattled off his cheap staples, and couldn't believe when I told him that those prices had nearly doubled. Except for Ramen. Ramen is always cheap. I argued that when money was tight I used to spend $100-$120 a month, and that was including junk food. Surely I could go a month spending only $60 if I tried. If you buy in bulk, you can save so much  more than shopping week to week.

But if you're living in poverty, you can't buy a month's worth of groceries all at once. So you wind up spending more.

We talked about trying to go for a month, spending just $60 total. I would of course have to do a lot of cooking, but I thought we could do it. It would show that you need to have money at the end of the week to get ahead-even in something as simple as groceries.

While we were trying to figure out a good month to try the experiment  I read that email. They were encouraging everyone to try to live on $1.50 a day, for 5 days. Starting in 2 days. That seemed doable, so we decided to give it a try.

After discussing what would probably be the cheapest foods to buy, we headed to our regular grocery store: Aldi. We were pretty off about what we could even afford (no rice or beans, which most previous LBL bloggers ate)

I brought $15 cash, and was determined to not go over. Somehow I ended up miscalculating. But for some reason, there was no tax on what we bought. So this, plus counting oranges we had already bought, we spent $14.99.

We bought:

Bread

Eggs

Carrots

Oranges

2 boxes of pasta

2 cans of cream corn

(they were out of reg. corn, but it was the same price, so we're swapping out for one at home) 

Oatmeal

Mustard

Bologna

Green Beans

2 cans Spinach

Tomato Sauce

Honestly, it was a stressful experience. The store was a little more crowded than normal, and it took us much longer to shop. It was embarrassing, adding up the groceries, and negotiating what we could and couldn't afford. We had to choose between cheese for sandwiches, or vegetables for dinner. Should we get green beans or corn? Which has more calories? What are we going to put with the pasta? We couldn't afford rice. They didn't have any small boxes, and we couldn't afford the jumbo bag. It watched the screen as the cashier rang it up. When it came to $13.20, B(forgetting the oranges at home) asked if he should go get an extra can of beans. I added it up in my head and realized we couldn't afford it. I was so embarrassed that I told the cashier we were doing an eat for $15 competition. 

I think the most emotional part was remembering my mom shopping when I was younger. Trying to get by as a single mom, after losing a job, I remember her stressed, realizing it was too expensive. 

I nearly cried while making these decisions. We can't get peas, so get another corn. I could easily have said "forget this, I quit" and walked out of the store. But trying to decide if we can stretch out 1 box of noodles to 4 meals, and maybe if I add water, we can get 2 meals from the tomato soup was very humbling. I have a budget in mind when I go to the store. I don't have to stick to it. I don't know how I would manage working with that kind of stress every week. Or, if I would have had to pay sales tax, the embarrassment of putting something back. 

This experience has already taught me how lucky we are. I am sure I will learn much more as we actually try to eat bologna sandwiches every day. 

I really don't like this brand of eggs, but it was on sale! We also tried very hard to have veggies every day, and some meal variety.

Here's the meal plan for next week. I used to plan out meals, but haven't lately. I have never had so detailed a menu that counted down how many carrots (1 1/2) that we can have with lunch.

I'm hoping by posting this here, and on Facebook  I'll force myself to stick to this. It won't be anything close to actually living without enough to get by, but it will definitely be an educational experience.  

-DearLadyDisdain

he is a very valiant trencherman; 

he hath an excellent stomach.