Food Stamp Challenge

So today officially begins my journey with the food stamp challenge that everyone else in the office has already begun. With my busy schedule over the past weekend I knew that I would not have been able to participate in the challenge without cheating, so I decided that instead of cheating I would just switch weekends and start today. I am lucky enough to be able to have my parents participate as well (which I thought was going to be a very hard task to accomplish) so we as a family have three times the amount of money as everyone else it seems. My mom and I made a list of things that we would need through out the week to make lunch & dinner (we don't really do breakfast except coffee for them and yogurt for me) and made a list of things we needed to buy.

My thought process is why buy food that we already own and let it go to waste? I know we were supposed to buy the things we needed, I just couldn't justify it. Instead, we pulled what we already had in our house, looked up the prices of those things in the sale ads, and just deducted those prices from our $63. After all was said and done, we have about $4 left over, which hopefully will cover my dad's coffee in the evening after work.

Although my family is used to not spending a lot of money every week on food, it was hard to stay under $63. If we were to actually go to the store and buy the things we were having this week, most of the things would be store brand and sometime not even from Meijer (where we do most of our grocery shopping). I did have to go to the store for such perishable items as milk, bread, bananas, lettuce, and yogurt that added up to about $11.

This week should get very interesting in terms of breaking old habits. I love cheese and salsa (random? yes.) and I have a tendency of just grabbing a couple pieces of cheese for a snack or breaking out some tortilla chips and salsa, but with our budget this week those things are not available to me. I just have to remember that and not go reaching in the refrigerator when I feel like a snack.