Financial budget- Meals

So, it looks like clarification of some things is desired, in regards to my budget. I will address things more information's wanted on in parts. Today, will be about food spending.

Everyone eats. We need to for survival. Let me be clear, when I said 2 dollars a meal or less, I meant 2 dollars. There are 30 days in a month, and 3 meals a day, so that is 3x30= 90. 2 people x 90 meals in a month = $180. It takes 180 dollars to accomplish said task. But my budget is less than that! I have $170 most of the year, and a few months a year, less than that!

Welp, here you go. Here are things I buy to eat, that we actually eat, and how much they are, and what constitutes a meal for us.

First things first, we don't eat TV dinners. I bet you thought we did. Nope. The closest thing to TV dinners we eat are Steamables. You can get them sometimes for 1 buck each, or a big one for 2 bucks, and off brand ones are sometimes less, like 90 to 98 cents. Steamables tend to mostly be vegetable, and frozen isn't as good as fresh, but it is better than canned.

We don't like the plastics that TV dinner meal trays are made out of, and don't like the 'fake' food. It isn't filling, it doesn't actually give us high nutrition, and so, we don't waste our time, nor our meager budget on them.

We also do not buy soda pop, juice, or any other 'drinks' except a single thing of milk. The milk not being for drinking, but for making meals with, means the only thing we actually drink is water. We might indulge, say at a family get together or party, in a drink other than water, but honestly, we mostly drink water there too.

Water is cheap, healthy (we do have a filter) and keeps my diabetic wife's sugar from fluctuating all over the place. Before she started drinking water only, she had horrible issues with her sugar levels being very sparatic.

I am a vegetarian, and my wife eats meat only once or twice in a month. I know there are people who cannot imagine this, but it helps our budget, and I am actually allergic to something in the processing of meat. Dunno what it is, but I am made sick every single time I eat any meat other than something completely fresh from my grandma in Alaska, that she did not preserve, but just vacuum packed and froze. All other meat makes me horribly sick. So, although, yes, it does save animals and it helps the environment by not destroying yet more wild land to make animal agriculture for people to eat yet more meat, it isn't actually for that reason, good reason though it is.

My wife, though she does like meat, she limits her meat ingestion because of the animal agriculture problems some, but mostly, it is actually for her health and our budget. My wife has a lot of health issues, and not eating a lot of meat, and instead consuming more vegetables and such, has really helped her. Her A1C is the best it has ever been in her whole life, her cholesteral is down, her weight is steady, and she has even had her sleep apnea improve.

It is not just good for the budget, how we eat, but it helps us not to have to constantly have her in and out of the hospital, as it was her whole life before she changed her eating.

Anyhoo, back to things we actually eat. Some things are really obvious. For instance, a can of soup is easily $2 or under. We like to get the bigger cans when on sale for $1.50. I am sure there are even cheaper options, but we find one big can is better than two little ones for $1 each.

Plus, $1.50 is automatically less than our $2. Remember, the max for a meal is 2 bucks, but we actually do need some meals to be cheaper. This is an easy way to make that happen.

Another thing we love to do is make pasta meals. We buy a box of pasta for 88 cents, and then add vege's we chop up ourselves to add in. We each get a bowl, put a little pasta and water in the bottom, put the vege's on top, and cook in the microwave a couple minutes, dump out the water, and boom! Meal ready to eat. One box of pasta lasts us typically 4 or 5 meals, because we tend to get the smaller pasta, which for us, equals more to eat. They leave less air between them compared to large pasta, so small shells vs big shells, we pick small. You get more pasta for your buck.

Anyhoo, let us say, that it was only 4 meals, for the sake of easy math. 88 divided by 4 is 22 cents a meal. That leaves us a lot of room to add other things to the mix.

For instance, a head of broccoli for 1.29. Cut that up into 4 parts and you get another 32 cents. up to 54 cents now. We could stop there if it is budget cutting time, but honestly, we usually get me a green pepper for 50 cents and my wife some mushrooms for a dollar. Sometimes we get tofu, or bok choy, cauliflower, potatoes, or even splurge on something really nice like asparagus.

The point is that our base cost is so small we can pick and choose a little, keep some variety in our diet, and even switch out small shell pasta for micro spaghetti noodles, or elbows, or whatever. It is a way on a budget to have some fun with this. I like my food to taste like the food it is, but my wife likes it to have sauces or other flavors. So a lot of times we get a garlic alfredo sauce or something to put on it. She also has just plain garlic salt for her pasta too.

Sometimes we splurge and go for 1 dollar rice noodles instead. A thing of soy sauce in our home lasts for a year, easy. We get the little vegetables to go on it, add a smidge of soy, and make it in the exact same way, in the bowl, with the microwave.

You can do this with rice and/or beans as well.

Another type of meal we like to have a lot would be wraps. A thing of tortillas is basically 3 bucks (slightly under, but I tend to round up, as to avoid ever going over budget) for 20 tortillas. We will usually eat 2 or sometimes 3 wraps for a meal. Now each tortilla shell is basically 15 cents each. Again, a really small base cost. We tend to get a can of black olives, which even if they are not on sale tend to be a dollar and maybe 20 cents. We also like to use some cottage cheese or some spinach artichoke dip. These things tend to be more expensive, at around 2 or 3 dollars for a container of it, but they last all month long, for every meal of wraps, which even if we only bought one thing of tortilla, and had 3 wraps each, would be 6 wraps a meal, that is 3 meals. So, let us say that the black olives were a full dollar and fifty cents, and the dip was a full three dollars, which means $4.50 divided by 6 which equals 75 cents. 75 cents plus the 15 cents each for the 6 tortillas, and we still are only at $1.65 for the meal. We also like to get pineapple tidbits or a little lettuce, if feeling like a crunch. Both amounts are less than a dollar. Spread that can of tidbits for 75 cents out over 3 meals and that is 25 cents of pineapple a meal. $1.85 a meal, for 3 meals, at the most expensive, is still less than 2 dollars. We actually don't usually spend even that, because we buy things on sale a lot.

We also love sandwiches, but not the peanut butter jelly kind. I am allergic to peanuts, and my wife actually doesn't like them. So, we make sandwiches out of things we actually like to eat. Firstly, I like real whole grain bread, multi-whole grain if I can get it. This means we never eat white bread. White bread has less nutrition, but also, again, we go for filling. We want our smaller meal to fill us up more.

One loaf for 2 bucks. 2 bucks divided by our eating 4 meals out of it (we eat two sandwiches at a time) is just the bread being 50 cents a meal. My wife LOVES the texture of avocado. 40 cents. We like pairing that with tomato. 1 buck. And some sliced cheese, which has 11 slices, and is 1.22 dollars for the pack of swiss or muenster, with us having 2 slices of cheese for the meal each, so 4 slices, is 44 cents for our cheese a meal. This meal actually comes out to OVER the 2 buck limit, but we don't eat it but twice in the month, which since most of our meals are less than the 2 dollars, we can splurge most of the year, when it is hotter and eating something hot isn't fun anyway, and afford our treat for the extra 35 or so cents. We slice the tomato and avocado into long thin slices, with the cheese, and munch away.

What about vege burgers or dogs? 3 bucks for the pack of meatless meat, with 4 patties or 6 dogs. That is 2 meals. That means 1.50 bucks already used up, but what is left? 1 dollars for a pack of buns, which means the other 50 cents for our two dollars is right there. I don't like sauces, but my wife likes a little ranch, but the ranch she uses for so many other meals. She spreads that 3 dollars out over 2 or more months for her sauce.

Now you might like other foods. But these are some things we eat. And this is how much they cost. This is how I find their cost. I see everything I look at this way. I see value, no matter what I look at, at all times, in how it pertains to our health vs our budget. We eat other things too, like burritos, cereal, oatmeal, salad, so on. These are just some examples. We eat our food and settle into our day and don't snack often or over indulge. We refuse to go over budget. We don't live off of only TV dinners, nor just Raman noodles, although my wife does like those once or twice a month. (dunno why, haha) The point is eating on a budget is functional, if you think it through, and find tastes you like while always putting foods that offer nutrition and fullness first on your priority list.

This is how we do it. You can take your budget and view food in the same way. Every phone has a calculator in it nowadays. Take advantage of it. Look at how much you are spending, and what you are spending it on. Maybe you are just not buying filling stuff, so you have to purchase twice as much. Maybe you are buying snacks and not meals. When you do the math, it all works out.