Day 1 - Eating on a $100 a month

In an effort to save money and to see whether it can be done, my husband and I are striving to live on $100 a month on food. I figured we can do this by buying just the basics – fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, bread and any meat that are on sale. Absolutely no eating out at fast foods (never mind sit-down restaurants). It seems impossible but this is our little experiment to see how far we can save. I will try to accurately put a value on every food item we use regardless of whether we already have it in the household or whether we have to buy it.

Well, after trying to figure out the value of 1 tablespoon cooking oil, I feel like I’m giving up now.  This is taking more time that I thought.  And it’s hard to believe that even only around mid-day today and we already have spent $7.02.  If we have reduced our brunch to a single soft boiled egg each and one slice of raisin toast each, it would have only cost us 70 cents.  But instead we had 4 eggs omelete, tea and strawberry-carrot juice/smoothie because we’re trying to start the new year healthy and it also shows it can get expensive.

I decided to bake Carrot Bread so we wouldn't waste the roughage from juicing carrots this morning.  And this turned out to be the most expensive item (total of $8.52) for the day.  So in total we have spent $17.49 already in just one day.  Well the carrot bread should last for more than 2 days. Wow, we’ve already used 6 days of budget in a day.


And here’s the complete day 1 food expenses:

Item	Price
1/2 pint cherry tomatoes	0.99
1 onion	0.05
4 eggs	0.8
1/4 cup milk	0.25
2 tbsp of ketchup	0.2
2 slices of raisin bread	0.3
1 tbsp of cooking oil	0.03
4 cups of strawberries	2.98
4 medium size carrots	0.22
2 stalks of celery	0.2
1 green tea bag	0.1
4 tbsp of roasted peanuts	0.2
1 small container of yogurt	0.25
mushroom soup from a can	0.75
2 kiwis	0.5
1/4 cup cashews	0.75
carrot bread (home baked)	8.52
slice of fruit cake	0.4
Total	17.49

And by the way, here's the Strawberry-Carrot juice I made: