The curse of live below the line

I'm sick again.

What is it about live below the line that does this to me? Fortunately it seems to be a nasty cold virus, rather than chicken pox this time so we are going to go ahead with the challenge.

I spent most of our budget on a chicken this year, so we'll be drinking plenty of chicken broth which should help aid recovery.

On the plus side, both kids appear to be coming down with said virus as well, so we should get a nice cuddly day on the sofa, which won't be too strenuous.

Unbelievable

I'd planned our meals down to a perfect budget for the week, still GAPS friendly, with a £1.02 contingency fund - then Matt announces that he is going to eat lunch and probably breakfasts at school.

This is a problem, because it reduces our joint grocery budget from £10 for the week to £6.66 for the week.

Goodbye salad leaves, goodbye eggs, and probably goodbye home made yoghurt.

I need to rebudget, but right now I have the chicken pox and I can't think clearly.

One thing is for sure though, I am not sending Matt to the shops without a list of exactly what to buy.

He'll come home with peanut butter.

One Week to go...

So there's only one week left until we start the 'Live Below The Line' challenge, and this year it's going to be harder than ever. This is on the most part because although I said I wasn't going to start the GAPS diet until after live below the line, we actually already started and seeing the improvement in our health, I don't want to go back.

I recently watched a documentary called 'Food Inc' too.

Now it's not just about health, but an ethical decision to want to stick to the diet. How can I justify getting sponsorship to raise awareness of extreme poverty, whilst buying products which exploit the worlds poorest and most vulnerable people?

That's right, people.

It's not just the animals that are abused in battery farming. Illegal immigrant workers are used for cheap labour in slaughter houses throughout the industry, whilst the subsidised corn prices in the US put third world farmers out of business and create famine, and genetic copyright laws are putting farmers under crippling debt or out of business.

If you haven't seen Food inc, you really should. You can watch it on netflix, who will give you a one month trial for free if you sign up with your facebook details, no obligation and you can cancel right after you watch it.

The most heart breaking section of the documentary is when they follow a family who have just $1 a day to buy food, so they buy fast food burgers from a 99c menu. The parents want to feed their children better, but they take a trip round a supermarket and show you that they can't afford broccoli ($1.29) or pears ($1 would only buy two, which wouldn't fill them up for the day). One of the reasons they can't afford any more is because the father is on medication for severe diabetes - caused by their diet. They can't afford the medication and a change of diet, and don't want to risk losing the father by coming off the meds.

These are the decisions faced by families in extreme poverty every day.

I'm going to be making some really difficult decisions about what I eat for the next week. I think that homemade yoghurt is going to be key once again as it only costs me 55p to make just over a pint, but I'm honestly not sure where else I can save. Some very careful budgetting is going to need to happen if we are going to eat real food in an ethical way and stay below budget.

Day one complete food diary - KJ

Here is my total food diary for today!

Breakfast

Toast x 2 with butter 12p

Large glass Kefir 1p

Lunch

Cup of soup (thai chicken yummy) 8p

one piece of toast 3.5p

Dinner

Jacket potato 11p

Salt & Pepper 1p

Butter 5p

Large glass Kefir 1p

Snacks

60ml homemade yoghurt 3p

Total cost of todays food = 45.5p

Well under budget. Unfortunately, there's nothing else I want, given that we can only eat more off the list we already have and I don't fancy plain rice!

The new budgeting rules have scuppered my plans for rationing Ribena as the bottle cost nearly £4 so there is no way I can work it into our budget. I'm getting withdrawal just thinking about it...

Budgeting issues

Turns out we've been doing this whole below the line thing wrong. It's still salvageable, but it's not quite what I thought it would be.

We just read the rules (why didn't we do that before we agreed to sign up?) and you have to budget £5 for what goes in your shopping cart to last you five days. You can't buy a bag of rice and say 'I'll only use half' and count it as half the price. Although they do recommend buddying up with someone so that your shopping goes further (eg you and a friend could buy the rice together and pay half each).

So....

Matt and I have £10 to share and we have to factor in WHOLE cartons of anything we've used so far. I suddenly resent the fact that he used peanut butter that has cost us £1.67 and I don't even eat it!!



Luckily I'm a very forgiving person. I probably won't hold it against him - for too long.

Working out what we've used so far means that we have spent:
Peanut butter £1.67
Bread 2 loaves £1.00
Butter £1.10
Cup of soups £1.00
Potatoes £1.49
Yoghurt £0.50
Rice £0.98
Kefir £0.15
Banana £0.11
---------------------------
£8.00

We've got £2.00 left.

I want to spend £1.60 of it on 350g of tofu. Matt might not be keen, but then he did use peanut butter...

- Kj
Xxx

Day 1 Breakfast

So here it is:

Breakfast:

Matt:

2 slices of bread = 7p (I love 2 loaves for 1.50 at Tesco now!)
20g Peanut Butter = 8p
2 Pints of tapwater
Total = 15p (18p added to later in the day. This is a piece of cake....)

KJ:

2 slices of toast (7p) + 5g of butter (5p) = 12p!

Upcoming difficulties.....

About to go to the park and try to walk past the ice cream van. Even a Minimilk is 60p, hoping we don't sell out 2 days food for a Magnum...