Boost Your Budget Pantry Challenge

You will always find me knee deep in a thorough clean out the week between Christmas and New Year's.  It may be closets, it may be drawers, or in this past week's case, it may be the fridges and freezers.  When you pull out frosty items that you don't actually remember procuring, it's time to do some serious clearing out. 

Engineer and I set some lofty financial goals last year and did fairly well with them but we didn't quite finish the race so to speak.   So this year, we will be the poster children for Dave Ramsey's "beans and rice, rice and beans" diet if we have to in order to reach our goals.

Luckily, we like rice and beans, but also we have more than enough non-beany/ricey sorts of food to get us by for awhile.  After all, that's what a stockpile is for, right?

Our Assets: 

• Full pantry, stockpile, cabinets, fridges, and freezers
• Arsenal of cookbooks and recipe cards
• Belong to a CSA and fresh local organic veggies come weekly
• Not too proud to show up at parents' door for supper (just keepin' it real)

Our Challenges:

• Family goes through dairy products like there is no tomorrow
• No going to restaurants (unless there is a gift card involved)
• Fruit still needs to be purchased lest we get scurvy

To keep this manageable, we will still purchase milk, eggs, cream, fruit, and cheese as necessary.  I am going to attempt to keep our grocery budget under $100 which should be no problem. 

As part of this challenge, I am also setting a personal goal to not spend at the drug stores unless it is a super good deal.  All in all, we are going to be on a bare bones budget so we can get lined up for financial freedom.  I don't bring in an income so my part is to make sure that Engineer's salary is stretched to its fullest potential.  So for this season in our lives, I may not be adding to the stockpile, but instead depleting it.

Our menu plan for the next month will reflect food that I have in house.  Who knows, we may go longer than a month (fingers crossed).  If you would like to see what we will be eating this week, here's our menu plan.

I am so pleased to be joining some talented bloggers Going Crazy Wanna Go?, The Frugalista Chick, , Matter of Cents, Coupon Pals, Thrifty Divas, Frugal Mom of Two, How About Free, TheItMom.com, All The World Is Art, Sweeping The USA, Mommies Point of View, Mama's Money Tree, Crunchy Frugalista, Fab Find Foodie, Making Time For Mommy, Adventures in Coupons, Full Price? NEVER!, The Frugal Navy Wife, Generations of Savings, and A Savings WOW! in taking Shopper Strategy's "Boost Your Budget Pantry Challenge" during the month of January.

If you would like to join in or see how other folks are facing the pantry challenge, please click through the linkys.