Too Weak Challenge!

March 15

It’s a challenge isn’t it? It dawned on blogger Andrew first but I’m running with it. His approach to the challenge at the beginning was logical: take a week’s food budget of $52.50 and buy your week’s groceries with that. I’m taking it a step further.

I’ve taken TWO weeks’ worth of food budget – $105 – and spent it on food. Check it out, yo:



With only $50 it’s hard to get many of the things that will diversify your diet and also last you long enough. A bag of rice and/or potatoes and a few packs of different types of meat will throw you over $50 in no time. You have more leeway if you think long-term. Off the initial OSAP deposit, I think the ideal move would be to use 3-4 weeks’ worth of grocery money at once to stock up. Buying a big bag of rice, frozen veggies, a jar of PB and some sale meats (put straight into the freezer) are musts and are pretty much non-perishable, and last forever. The stock-up is initially painful, but as the supplies run out at different rates, replacing them at need and one at a time becomes much more manageable financially.



I’m trying to make do here with two weeks’ cash. My grocery total came out to $100.83, which leaves less than $5 to wiggle with for two weeks, unfortunately. I’m going to have to plan my menu carefully to maximize use of my perishables. On my shop I also bought stuff that I already had in my pantry to make the test seem realistic. I’m curious if anyone thinks that’s excessive, i.e. that I should have just continued calculating the cost of the stuff I had or if buying the stuff makes the experiment more legitimate and rigorous.

Here’s what I predict. Deliciousness. Also, by the end of two weeks, there’ll be enough left over that if I were to work on a third week, filling out that week’s grocery needs on a week’s budget would be much easier.

Come along. It'll be interesting.