Today one of the stand alone drawer units we are using in our crappy kitchen broke – beyond repair.
Drawers are done and dusted
We took the opportunity to replace both the drawers and our too tiny food cupboard with a new pantry.
When I was unloading our narrow dark little cupboard, I was surprised at how much food it was hiding in it’s dark recesses. We now have loads of space and we’re one step closer to having a relatively functional kitchen.
Our skinny old pantry!
New pantry needs some more shelves I think!
To give you an update our kitchen has never been renovated in it’s 62 year old life. I’ve bemoaned the state of it before, but we won’t be doing it up for years and the current kitchen is likely to become a bedroom, so no point investing too much in it. I will be painting the cupboards sometime soon because the current paint job is woeful.
Anyway, I launched Crash Ca$h last week with an awesome way to save hundreds of dollars on health insurance. One reader has already secured $1341 for her back pocket! My next crash test in this challenge is to save money on food and tonight I stumbled across the $21 dollar challenge on the website Simple Savings which was recommended to me by Crash Test Community member Vicky
It’s about eating what you already have in your pantry, fridge and freezer and spending only $21 on other food for a week (not every week!). Apparently the average family spends around $320 per week on food, so by doing this challenge one week in the month, you could save $3600 a year on food!
Eating from your pantry was a common tip given by members of the Crash Test Community when I put the call out on how to save money after we ran out of it recently!
We didn’t get a chance to do our usual market and grocery shop this weekend, and it’s the last week before payday, so what better time to crash test the $21 challenge!
We usually spend between $200-250 a week on groceries and the odd takeout (maybe more, I haven’t worked it out exactly because we don’t budget!) Anyway, we could certainly do with learning how cheaply we could eat if we were more mindful about it.
By the end of today (Monday) I’ll have done a meal plan based on what we have in stock. Tomorrow I’ll post a photo of my $21 grocery shop! Throughout the week we will post photos of our meals on FB and Instagram and Twitter using the hashtags #crashcash and #21dollarchallenge.
Have you done the $21 Challenge before? Do you want to join me in doing it this week? Let me know in the comments below :)
Laney x
Woah! I’m pretty shocked by the average weekly grocery costs! I’d say we normally spent around 100 dollars a week? But lately I’ve limited myself to $50 dollars a week and it’s been great. Less spending money on silly things and only buying what we need. Buying in bulk. Baking some bread and crackers (since we go through a lot of bread and crackers around here). Totally doable.
That said, I dont know if i could do 21 dollars! I’m keen to give it a go though. It would mean pulling a lot from the freezer and getting pretty creative with the stuff in the pantry. Maybe it IS doable!!
Talia
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I have done the challenge a number of times, we actually managed to do it for a fortnight last summer.
In saying that, we did it, but we didn’t keep under $21, we were more like about $75, because we eat a lot of fresh fruit and veg and go through a lot of milk. However the $75 still saved us about $200 each week and helped to really clear our the freezer of lots of food that would have otherwise gone to the bin in a few weeks. The only problem I did find was that the next shop up you do can be about $50 more than usual, we ate down all the ‘extras’ the flour, the oats, the tinned tomatoes, the froz peas etc, they all needed restocking at once.
I am keen to hear how you go, and others, how do you get the family to live on just $21 of fruit and veg a week.
I reckon you’ll do fine!
You might end up eating the same or similar meals twice in the week and you might have to bake more snacks and sweet treats rather than but them, but if you can cope with that you’ll be right!
Because we work on a monthly grocery budget and budget around about $50 a week for fresh fruit and veg, milk, bread and extras (that’s on top of our big monthly grocery shop) if I splurge a little during the month or if the apple consumption gets out of control and I spend more than my $50 a week I often get to the last week of the month and find myself scraping together whatever is left cause I’ve run out of money!
And yeah I am a little blown away by the average weekly spend too… we budget $550 a month, though we could easily spend loads more if we could afford it and wanted to.
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Love this idea Laney. My pantry overflows with things and stuff. And I still spend about $200 a week (and more some weeks). I could easily save some dollars if I was careful :) Will be very interested to see what you come up with.
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I monthly shop with a weekly top up of fruit, veg, milk, bread and deli meat. I only buy what we should use in the month based on a meal plan so end of month there is very little left besides the basics flour etc.. I find if I don’t plan the grocery bill skyrockets and we waste a lot more. Good luck with your challenge, I reckon you can do it by the looks of your pantry but depends what is in the fridge and freezer?
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I’m involuntarily pretty much doing this challenge this week anyways due to being smacked with a couple of huge unforeseen costs and recently ending my uni degree thus losing my youth allowance. I’m also trying to continue to eat ‘clean’ but its definitely true that healthy foods are more expensive then if i were to just buy chips and noodles.
I also am starting from scratch as i have been away so there is no food in my fridge :/
Good luck to us both!
:)
xx
I just cleaned out the pantry this weekend and threw out lots of expired sauces :( I am going to try and use use pantry stuff this week – there are way too many half opened packs of nuts, seeds and sauces.
Just an idea to share that I think comes from the simple saving site, and book. We are a family of five. So I allow $5 per person. It doesn’t include pet food, or any other items other then FOOD. We are big fruit eaters too. I’ve just been doing my pantry and meal plan for the week, and writing my list and there are 13 food items on it. 5 of them are fruit and vege.
Laney shall I share my menu plan, etc on a post in ,y blog, and link to here? Or put it here? :)
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Good Luck Laney :) I really want to try this challenge but I’m not sure $21 would cover the fresh fruit and vegies my family eats in a week! I do menu plan regularly so I was shocked when I had a good look at my pantry and STILL found a build up of things we could use! Can’t wait to see how you go :)
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We had a week where we did not have any money coming in, and so we used whatever was in our cupboard! Its amazing with what you can make from basic ingredients and yet we ate well that week. There is a lot of wastage with buying out and buying things we think we need, compared to what we only really need! All the best with the challenge :)
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I did my first 21 dollar challenge a couple of years ago and to this day I still do it to the extent where I try to use as much as possible of what is left in my pantry and fridge before I go grocery shopping. So instead of sticking to a $21 shopping budget, I will instead stretch my weekly ‘shop’ to 9 or 10 days. My kids used to hate it because they always complained that there was nothing to eat, but then I pointed out to them that it’s the money I save by stretching the food we have that allows me to pay for things like their martial arts classes,gym memberships and navy cadets expenses. Over time they’ve learned to accept it and they’ve also become more creative with creating meals for themselves during the day when I’m at work if there are no left overs for them in the fridge.
http://cookingwithwhatever.blogspot.com.au/
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Hi Valerie. I just saved your comment from the spam folder. Sorry I didn’t see it until now. That is some great feedback. We managed the $21 week and after some careful planning have spent $66 for this week’s groceries (will probably need to buy more milk along the way though!). It is a great skill you are teaching your kids :)
Not a problem and thank you so much for the reply.
I just re-read my post and realised how it must have sounded when I said that my kids complained that there was never anything to eat. I should probably point out that there was and still is always food to eat, lol, I wouldn’t let my kids starve, but to them, something to eat meant something quick and easy to grab where they didn’t have to put much effort into preparation as well as ice cream, cookies and chips to snack on.
Also well done on surviving the challenge, $66 is quite a feat with the cost of food in Australia. Think you’ll be posting some of the recipes you came up with?
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