Food Budget Cost & Guidelines

Various agency guidelines claim that today's budget for groceries should be about $50 per person, per week. That's $100 for two per week.

That doesn't count toiletries that are essential (deodorant, dental supplies, or even a one-a-day vitamin). It is all well and good to say we should be able to cut costs by using non-disposable items like cloth diapers and rags instead of paper towels. But it doesn't take into consideration other necessary paper or laundry products.

In today's world, we need detergent that will work inside our washers. We cannot use a cheap bar of lye soap and a washboard in a laundry tub.

Bathroom tissue has replaced the pages of the Sears & Roebuck catalog, newspaper and corn husks.

Perhaps we could splash on or dab on rubbing alcohol instead of deodorant. Perhaps we could use baking soda on our teeth as my grandparents used to do.

But supplies for denture wearers are specialty items and cost a few bucks each month, as do some other necessities for which there is no cheap substitution.

These incidentals surely should be added to the food/household necessity budget guidelines.

As for just-plain-food - that $50 per person does not quite make it. If you buy cheap, highly fatty ground meat, nitrate-laced turkey hot dogs, and the cheapest white bread instead of a wholesome whole wheat bread, you risk health concerns.

Many times in my life, including this past year, I have made dry milk into a liquid and used it for cooking, for my personal cold cereal (which I love and which is mostly generic), to try to stretch the budget. I turn stale bread into French toast (again with liquefied powdered milk).

I guess I am wondering how one can deal with a healthful breakfast, lunch and dinner on just $50 per person without standing at the stove and sink all day. My legs do not have the stand-ability they once had. So, even if my heart was into an enormous round of cooking-from-scratch, my stamina level is not capable of doing this.

What brought this up is that I have suddenly realized that all my good intentions and efforts toward getting my bills caught up are dead in the water. I keep forgetting to budget in another $100 a week for 2 people in the house.

This became a problem because for two years, most of 2010 and 2011, my middle-aged nephew worked as a cabbie. We used his daily tips for food and incidentals and didn't need to take funds from paychecks or my SSA. Then, when that well dried up and he worked at a sandwich shop for about 9 months, we started feeling the pinch. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. It was just this past week or two that it sank in. I have not been building in food/incidental costs in our planned expenses.

His current unemployment is helping us get back on track when coupled with my SSA, but we are still a tad pinched because I have to keep dipping into what I call "bill money" for food and daily essentials. I guess I need to find a way to get just one basic "entree" order in that will set us up and to build on. I have a good upright freezer and can stock some meats and other foods. I'm planning to put any Etsy sales and other "non-fixed-income" income into one basic food and supplies order to get us started on the right foot again. My slow cooker can help me put up some pre-cooked meals for days when I just don't have the energy to stand and cook.

This will all work out, eventually, but I wonder how much other folks budget for daily food and incidentals (paper, laundry, sundries). Are we low or are we high? I wonder how realistic those guidelines really are.