So, you’ve decided to go on the Dollar Diet! Wahoo! Go for it!
If you’ve never heard of a Dollar Diet before, start here. If you’re keen to get going, it helps to have an idea of how it might work practically in YOUR life.
Here’s what a week of Dollar Dieting looked like for me:
Wins
I did a lot of home baking. At the moment I’m a stay-at-home parent, with school-aged children, so I have time for this. I made banana muffins, pizzas, burger buns and pudding.
I love baking breads and experiment a great deal, but I’d never tried burger buns before. I used this recipe, and they turned out brilliantly! Soft, fluffy and delicious.
I made the pizza and burgers on two different nights that we were out. Rev D and I have a ministry training session one night a week. It’s at 5pm, an awkward time. We bring our children along because babysitters are costly! Our children LOVE it, because they get to have screen time during this training (we can’t be interrupted). If the weather is nice, I pack dinner for us to eat at a park or beach nearby afterwards.
Our training session is in the middle of the city – surrounded by great restaurants. It is so tempting to take the easy way out and grab dinner after the meeting. When you’re on a Dollar Diet, eating out occasionally is fine, but we don’t make a habit of it. Instead, I make easy, portable dinners like pizza or sandwiches, and everyone is perfectly happy.
I shelf-shopped BEFORE I meal planned and went grocery shopping. If you’re unfamiliar with the term shelf-shopping or shelf-cooking, it was coined by Jordan Page over at Fun, Cheap or Free. Jordan is one of my favourite frugal bloggers, and she explains shelf-cooking in more detail here. In a nutshell, as you plan your meals for the week, first check your fridge for items that are close to expiring and going off. Use these items up asap. Then check your freezers – what needs to be used up? Then check your pantry. Only after this do you start making a meal plan and grocery list.
You might meal plan like this anyway – it’s not rocket science – but if you don’t already, this method will definitely prevent food waste and save you money.
Looking in my fridge, I noticed we had carrot sticks and hummus that needed eating up in a couple of days. So they became snacks for the next two days. I checked my condiments and discovered a bottle of butterscotch sauce way in the back of the fridge with an expiration date of April. I don’t even know when we got this sauce or who gave it to us (we are often given random gifts at Christmas!), but I decided to use it up by making a special dessert – Butterscotch Pudding. So good! Dessert is rare for us, so my children were disappointed that butterscotch was not to their liking. Oh well, at least I found a way to use that sauce up, and Rev G got lots of leftovers.
Looking at my freezer, I saw a bag of spinach that had been lurking in there for a while, so that was thrown in with a chicken curry. In the pantry I had potatoes that needed to be used up (they became latkes), and some lentils (used in a vegetarian curry).
Wasted, spoiled or expired food is money down the drain. Shelf-shop what you’ve got, and save!
We keep a large pantry of supplies – enough that we could get by for several weeks if we had to. We began shopping this way well before the Covid pandemic hit. We lived rurally for a couple of years and supermarkets were a 30 minute drive away. Keeping a well stocked pantry saved us a lot of time and petrol money. I rotate the stock we have so it doesn’t spoil, but now we know we are moving cities soon, I am deliberately running our stock down. Anyway, by shelf shopping, my grocery bill was $140 for the week, mostly perishables: eggs, milk, veggies, meat etc. In New Zealand the average weekly shop for a family of four is around $350. And that’s rising fast thanks to record inflation.
We follow a flexitarian diet. We eat some meat – mostly chicken, fish and beef, but aim to have vegetarian dinners 3-4 times a week. Even though farming is the backbone of my country, prices for meat here are insane. Eating meat-free meals saves us considerable money, and it’s good for our health too.
My husband rarely needs new clothes, but has some jerseys (sweaters) that are starting to look rather tatty. After not finding anything suitable in the op-shops (charity stores), I found him a good quality jersey online that was heavily discounted.
We had to vacate our home for an evening as some tradesman were renovating some things around our home. Rev G and I can do basic repairs and renovations, but we know when to get in professionals. We could have gone out to dinner and a movie, but for four of us, that’s a lot of money. We could have gone to friends. but coronavirus is spreading quickly through my children’s school right now, and we didn’t want to risk spreading it to others. Instead we went to my husband’s church which was not being used that night. It has a full kitchen, so I made dinner and we had a family movie night.
We will soon be moving cities and are getting our house and garden ready to put on the market (hence the renovations). This week I deep cleaned our pantry and bathroom, and worked in our garden. There is plenty of time before we move, so I am slowly preparing for it, by cleaning and decluttering, weeding and pruning. I have moved A LOT in my life (about 30 times…) and vouch for the slowly-but-surely method. It can save you so much money. By decluttering early you have time to sell items you don’t need or want anymore. Slowly sorting out your stuff means you can put anything unsalveagable in your weekly rubbish collection, rather than hire a skip for a big blitz just prior to a move. Friends of mine did this and that skip bin cost hundreds of dollars!
Yesterday was International Children’s Day. We usually celebrate this by taking our children out to do something fun. Our family is big on celebrating. The purpose of Children’s Day isn’t to shower children with gifts, but to remind them how loved and precious they are and spend time with them. I welcome any opportunity to celebrate my kids, and they look forward to this day each year. Here in Wellington there is a fabulous plaground, Motutawa Avalon Park. We threw the children’s bikes in the back of the car, as the park has a fake road/bike track. We spent several hours playing, and treated the children to a ride on the train ($2 per person).
I stayed home a lot. I’m normally a busy, social person but due to Covid cases being high at the moment, I’m staying away from friends that are vulnerable or essential workers. Petrol prices are through the roof, so I batch errands, walk and car pool and just plain STAY HOME when possible. My plate is full preparing to move house anyway, so staying at home is a good use of my time.
Losses
As mentioned, there are some small renovations around our home that need some expert attention. Rev D is a pretty handy guy, but lacks the time to do much DIY (being a pastor sucks up a lot of time in evenings and weekends!). I do what I can myself, and learn a lot from YouTube, but know my limitations. We’ve only owned our house for a year, and hadn’t planned to move on so soon, but life has a way of throwing curve balls. When we bought it the house had been spruced up a bit for sale by a home handyman, and quite frankly, it shows, and that’s why we’re getting in the professionals. The housing market in New Zealand has flipped from a seller’s to a buyer’s market, so we need to put our best foot…uh, house, forward. We haven’t paid for the renovations yet, but expect them to be around $1,500. Our savings covers this.
In the same vein I paid for a weekly green waste bin pickup. We haven’t done much to our garden since moving in, as our local council needs to replace pipeline that goes through our backyard and several of our neighbours. Despite being told this would happen last year, there’s no sign of them! In preparation for moving I’ve been spending considerable time in our garden making the place look presentable. In normal circumstances I would simply compost the green waste and be done with it, but the spot where I would put compost bins is exactly where the council needs to dig. The previous owners had let the garden get rather overgrown, so it’s been quite an effort to get it looking spick and span, but doing the garden myself is a high priority on the Dollar Diet. Getting rid of the green waste, slowly but surely is the most cost-effective way to dispose of it. I plan to not need this service at all at our next home.
So that’s it, a week in the life of. What frugal things have you been up to this week?