Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Outnumbered the Podcast. I'm Audrey. And I'm Bonnie. We are experienced moms to a combined total of 19 children. In our weekly episodes, we explore relatable topics using our perspectives of humor and chaos. Tune in for advice and encouragement to gain more joy in your parenting journey.
Speaker: Welcome back, friends. We are here with an episode that is super logistical friendly for those of you that just like the meaty tips. We're going to be talking about saving money, which is another favorite of ours and probably every mother on the planet. How to save money specifically on groceries. There's a couple of reasons we decided to do this one. Number one, inflation. Everyone's complaining about inflation, right? The cost of milk, the cost of gas.
Speaker: So we figured it was a timely episode. And also, some financial projections are showing that the economy is on its way to a recession. So no reason to worry, but rather be prepared and be as self -reliant as possible. Right. And when your grocery bill budget goes up, then if you're on a budget, then it has to come from other places as well. We're going to talk about this more. So we're going to talk about how to keep that grocery
Speaker: bill within its budget as much as possible. Okay. So I wanted to share, this is kind of grocery and food related. So we recently got an incubator. This isn't the first time we've incubated and hatched chicks, but for my youngest kids, this is the first time Dave they've seen it. So, you know, we have like, you know, the older kids and we did it with them. So we went and got another incubator. We got a totally way better one this time. I can lick it in the show notes, whatever.
Speaker: But, so we have an incubator and the kids, the younger kids, the first time they're getting to watch chicks hatch. So they were watching the chicks hatch and there were two eggs that were, they were like partly hatched and the kids are cheering on, you know, which egg they think is going to
Speaker: you know, get out first, which chick is going to be out first. And one of my boys says, last one has a rotten egg. And then they were like, Oh, that's where that expression comes from. Mom, because these other eggs that didn't hatch was because they were, you know, so they thought that was totally hilarious that they had on their own figured out where that expression comes from the last one. No, it's a rotten egg because they use that all the time.
Speaker: Yeah. Side note, I was today years old when I just figured out what that meant. I think I was telling you on another episode that I was out, I think it was just a week or two before Easter and I was out gathering eggs because our chickens just roam everywhere. And as I reached down to pick up this blue egg under a tree, I'm like,
Speaker: Oh, Easter egg hunts. They're not just some random tradition that somebody came up with. We literally hunt for colored Easter eggs because chickens lay all colors. But this is so funny when you're separated from the production of food, all the things in your culture that come from that that you didn't even know. So funny. Yes. And happily this episode, we are getting to talk more about producing your own food too.
Speaker: That's right. We need to get right in. We have so much to talk about. Yes. Audrey's family is an expert at that, so I'm excited to hear about it. During COVID, 2020, everything went wacky, right? A lot of us had to figure out how to work with smaller household budgets. Sometimes people were underemployed or jobs were not super reliable. That was something that really sparked my mind, like, okay, how self -reliant are we and how little can we actually live on when it comes to groceries? This has been fresh on many of our minds for the last few years.
Speaker: Yeah, many people have a lot of expenses that they can cut before they get to their grocery budget. But with a large family, it's just a huge, huge thing you have to budget for. And in our family, particularly, we have the viewpoint that we cut down on our medical bills by the way that we eat. So that makes our grocery bill even bigger because we're eating as healthy as we can to
Speaker: avoid some of the medical bills by being so healthy. So we'll talk more about that too, but that makes our grocery bill even larger. We do have less of a medical budget, but more of a grocery budget. So it's huge when you rely so much on food for your health.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a big part. So I think you mentioned in a previous episode that your family invests a lot of money in good quality supplements. Is that part of your grocery budget? It is. Yes, we put that in our grocery budget as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Side note, I actually wrote a blog post all about our family's journey in seriously decreasing our spending a couple of years ago. And so I'll link to that in the show notes. We ended up cutting our spending by about 30%, which was pretty huge for our large family. But we made it work, and it was a great learning experience.
Speaker: Okay, so to talk about spending less on groceries, the first step, obviously, is to figure out how much you have been spending. And you may be great with numbers and know almost down to the dollar what you spent this last month and the month before. But for all the rest of us, normal people, we'll probably have to do a little bit of digging. If you listen to our episode with Emily Burnett, episode 148, she talks about her favorite budgeting app. She uses YNAB, but everyone needs some sort of budgeting system. So go back into your budgeting system, look at the last, I would say four to six months,
Speaker: and create an average of how much you spend on groceries. If you are currently eating out more than you would like to, I would add that in because you're going to have to bump up your grocery budget to eat out less, although it won't cost quite as much.
Speaker: right and so if you don't have a budgeting app look for one there's there's a lot out there um or you can do my husband just couldn't find one that he liked for our budget and so he he created one that that works for us and so we have um we actually have all our food in in one and we we very rarely eat out so i think that's why we don't have a separate dining budget ours is are just all together um but part of
Speaker: Yeah. So part of our supplements are included in that, but then also, um, you know, some of the, like when we're planting the garden, like the seeds, soil amendments and things, those are come out of that, that whole food budget. So it is quite a huge chunk, um, for us, but it does include a couple of these other little areas. So just figure out what it is for you and what it includes and, you know, and then start, like you have to have some more to start from before you can figure out where you want to go.
Speaker: Right. Do you also include care for your animals that you use as food? Like does that include like feed for your right? Right. No, we have that. We have that as a separate like like farm.
Speaker: I mean, they eventually are food, but - But maybe not this month, so it doesn't make sense. Right, right, right, right. For example, the cow's food comes from the farm budget, but we drink her milk, so that's less out of our grocery budget. We don't buy any dairy, so yeah. If you do not have a budgeting app, no shame there. Just open up your bank account.
Speaker: go through the past couple of months, after probably one month, you'll be ready to be done, but at least two months' worth and add up just all your grocery store receipts, right? So however much you've been spending there, again, be aware of how much you're spending out or on things that are related to food. Maybe you go to the park once a month with your friends and you all buy pizzas, you might want to add that in. Basically, when we fail to plan really well for our groceries and meals, then we often end up eating out way more than we should, so that's something to keep in mind.
Speaker: Yep. All right. The second step is, now that you know where you are and what you're spending, decide what you want to spend. Or even if you want to stay at that number and the inflation is driving it up, some of these tips that we're going to be giving you will help you stay at that number. So figure out what's your number. What do you want to spend? This is crucial. You cannot live without food.
Speaker: So you've got to work on staying on that number, you can. But sometimes it's easier just to look other places to see if there's fat to trim somewhere else. Pun intended, not intended. So to speak.
Speaker: Yes. Okay, so included in the show notes, we are going to add a link to a grocery calculator so you can put in how many people in your house, what kind of a budget you have, either it's something really meager or something very generous, and it will tell you kind of a rough idea of what you should be spending.
Speaker: This can help you decide just how much to cut. For example, let's say your family's been spending about $1 ,500 a month on grocery and you go do the calculator and you have four kids and it says, actually, most people or it should be closer to 1 ,000 or 1 ,200, then you can say, okay, we have been a little bit over. Or conversely, you may even find out that you've been trying to live on a grocery budget that is way too small for your family.
Speaker: And that can offer some freedom as well. You can choose, like Audrey said, to cut some spending in other areas so that you can eat quality food and have enough so you're less tempted to eat out. All right.
Speaker: It can also be helpful to ask family, friends, people who live near you who have similar family sizes, how much they spend on groceries. Not everybody wants to share this and that's fine, but grocery prices do vary from city to city, place to place, store to store. So you want to compare, you know, if you're shopping at an organic health food store
Speaker: That's, those prices are going to be different than Walmart. So like just possibly comparing with other people, but you can also do a lot of price shopping like within your, your town. Um, I, you know, I, I'd say this sort of with a little bit of hesitation because I, with a bunch of kids don't have time.
Speaker: to go to 18 different stores to get milk here and eggs here and butter here because it was on sale. At some point my time comes into play here and into consideration as well.
Speaker: Yes. As much fun, actually, as it can be to clip coupons and drive around to try to find that best deal, we, like Audrey said, as busy moms, feel like there are some cuts we can make in other areas that will make that almost unnecessary. But you're still welcome to do it if you feel like that really makes a big difference. But with the price of gas, I really don't recommend driving all over town anyway, so let's save money.
Speaker: Oh, you know what we should have done is got my mother -in -law is on as a guest in this episode. Allegedly, she was given a $50 check per week to spend on groceries when she was raising her family. So, I mean, you know, this was what, 30, 40 years ago, but still probably should have. Yeah. Yeah. She got so creative in what she would cook. And there's an infamous story in the family, something, my husband and siblings, something about a liver and sauerkraut pizza that'll never die or something.
Speaker: What are those stories? What are those family stories? That's funny. Yeah, you know, interestingly enough, I shared my grocery budget and a few insights into how we spend money on food on Instagram the other day and had a friend from the Pacific Northwest say that's what she spent for her family and they had like three or four kids. So less than half what we have. So obviously area of the country matters a great deal and obviously the quality of food.
Speaker: Okay, so number three, we're gonna go with the whole motto of fail to plan, plan to fail, right? If we do not plan what we are eating, we are going to overspend every single time. I would claim that meal planning is the number one thing you can do to save money on groceries, as well as time, right? Included in this is limiting your grocery shopping to one trip a week, or if you have two major stores that you go to, one time each at those stores. Every time you go, you're gonna spend more money.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. You know what's interesting about that is my mom did her grocery shopping once a month and that was pretty fascinating. Now, admittedly, fresh fruits and vegetables weren't like a huge priority when I was growing up because you can't do that like on a once a month basis. But in the summer, we had fresh gardens so that
Speaker: made up the difference there, but my mom just do the constraints of her where we lived. It was quite a ways to town and she did a once a month shopping trip and you can see how like we do that like with Costco. It's quite a ways away from us and we do like a once a month thing to Costco, but we have a plan, right? So that's what we're talking about here is planning.
Speaker: So just everything planning, like Bonnie and I were saying, we need to do a whole episode on meal planning. And if you guys want that, let us know because there's so much depth here that we could go into. So not only planning what you're cooking for the week, but planning when you're grocery shopping. Are you hungry? Don't go shopping hungry. That's like number one.
Speaker: You will be spending more money, but then time of day. If you go grocery shopping at the end of the day, they're going to be out of a lot of supplies, potentially. Maybe the thing that you're looking for is all bought out, and so you have to buy a more expensive version cut of meat or something, because the one you were looking for is gone. That's like a daily basis. Then how about the weekly basis?
Speaker: What are you cooking that week? Does it have like the same theme or the same main ingredients? If you're going to cook Italian one night and Mexican the next night and then go to, you know, tie for some, and then some curry the next night, like that is a whole bunch of spice profiles. If you don't have those on hand on similar ingredients, you're either going to have a lot of leftover ingredients or buy a lot of extra. So that's like a weekly idea. Like, okay, this week we're going to do a bunch of
Speaker: Mexican meals and then next week we're going to, you know, so that you're more similar on what you buy and you don't have half empty containers that are a waste. But then how about on a yearly basis? So this branches off a little bit into, um, how we produce our own food. So we, we plan for the garden. Okay. This year we have some green beans leftover. And so we're not going to plant as many green beans this year because we still have some leftover from last year.
Speaker: but we definitely ran out of corn before we wanted to or, you know, peach jam or whatever, you name it. And so we need to make sure that we get more of those preserved, planted and preserved. So planning from the hour that you go shopping to like a big year plan, that is, that is like, there's so many ways to plan. And then another thing I wanted to mention about planning is it is cheaper to buy in bulk. So if you're going to cook a bunch of meals, you know, it's, it's a lot cheaper to buy bulk.
Speaker: hamburger and then plan multiple meals that use ground beef or use half and freeze half or something like that. So there's all sorts of ways to look into this idea of planning. And, you know, it's kind of like what we talk about in a lot of the rest of our episodes. It's planning is another word for being intentional, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It can save us so much time and money to just plan ahead a little bit. Admittedly, it's not my favorite thing to do either, for sure. I don't like to plan. I don't like to grocery shop. I don't like to do any of it, but it goes a long way. That being said, the only time I like to grocery shop is when I'm starving.
Speaker: I just walk through the store going, yep, yep, yep, yep. Give it all to me. It all sounds good. The best time to cook is when you're hungry, but the best time to grocery shop is probably right after a meal. Right, right, right, right. For sure. And you know, I'm sure you've heard this line before that like, you know, you run to the store for a gallon of milk and it ends up costing you $50 because you get the gallon of milk and then you also get the crackers that look good.
Speaker: So, every time you show up at the store, you're going to be spending more money, obviously, and probably more than you even planned on because of impulse purchases, right? So, we actually... I'm not always super consistent on the day of the week, but we only go grocery shopping once a week. And when we run out of milk before grocery day, we just go without milk till grocery day. And I think it's really helpful for my children, number one, to help them ration a little bit because there's a lot of them and they're hungry little munchkins.
Speaker: They would just go through anything delicious in two days if they thought that I would just replenish it every time they did. Now, don't get me wrong. My kids are not going hungry, but they have to get creative and maybe eat some leftover oatmeal for breakfast instead of their favorite cereal or something because they ate that all in the first two days. So that's kind of how we run things at our house. And here's a plug for grocery pickup. I can't tell you how much money we have spent by ordering groceries and just picking them up because I'm not the one walking through the grocery store.
Speaker: It's the guy at the grocery store who doesn't care whether or not Oreos looked good to me that week. He just gets what's on the list. He's even better than your husband because he's going to pick up some ice cream or something. Or I will say if one of you, if you or your spouse dislikes grocery shopping more than the other, make that person do it because chances are they're going to get in and out without dilly -dallying. If it's your fun time to get away from the kids, then make your husband do it instead and maybe you'll spend lots of money.
Speaker: Yes, so such good ways to save money there. I think that's the best way that we have, even though we put it at number three, was just the planning, the thinking about it. So then here's another thing to talk about. We're going to move on to number four. What's your highest value when it comes to food?
Speaker: So I mentioned that we use food as part of our health. So food is pretty important to us. We want food that is very nutrient dense. Um, but what is your, what is your value? Is it organic? Is it locally sourced? Is it pre -packaged? Is it easy to prepare fast? You can't have everything when you're on a smaller budget. So you've got to pick out which, what is your value when it comes to food? What's your priority and make that happen.
Speaker: and then kind of let some of the others go, yes, sourdough bread takes a lot longer than buying a loaf of bread. But if you're valuing time, you're gonna buy just the prepaid loaf of bread. If you're valuing health or nutrient content, you're gonna take the time and make the sourdough bread.
Speaker: Right, right. Everything of value requires either time or money, right? And sometimes both. But that's an important point, Audrey, that you really can't have both on a limited budget. For the most part, we also value high quality over easy to prep. But occasionally, like my husband and I left town the other day, and we went to the grocery store and just bought a bunch of stuff that was easy to make because we knew our kids and the sitter were going to be in charge. And I want to make sure that they had something to eat.
Speaker: didn't require cooking from scratch because that wasn't going to happen with mom gone, right? Even though many popular nutrient deficient foods are cheap, you're going to pay for it eventually, right? And that's what Audrey is saying, right? Do you want to pay for it down the road when you have health problems or do you want to pay for it right now in high quality food? And
Speaker: If you know how to cook food from scratch, that very often is way cheaper than buying the prepackaged stuff. But you have to get familiar with the kitchen, right? And don't overwhelm yourself. You might even pick just four or five meals that your family enjoys and that are very simple to prepare but nutrient rich that you just get familiar with over and over. And the bonus to that is you don't waste ingredients because you're going, you know, you get really
Speaker: good at how exactly how much your family eats of that recipe. And you always have the ingredients on hand. You're not thinking, oh shoot, we're going to do this new Thai recipe. Not that you can't do new things, but getting in the habit of the same similar foods tends to help you save money because you're not always buying extra stuff. Yep. And then you'll get better at prepping and making those meals. Just try one, like give yourself permission to
Speaker: to explore but like once a week. I can remember a time when I got in this mindset where every meal had to be exciting and fun and new and that got expensive, right?
Speaker: Yeah, you'll waste less and you'll know what to buy. So, you know, you want to think about also those shelf -stable ingredients. Like, how long is this going to last? Like, can I buy it in bulk and get more of it? Another thing I wanted to say about nutrient -dense food is you do end up saving money in the short term as well, because what we have discovered is when we feed our kids nutrient -dense meals, they snack less.
Speaker: So we're not buying snack foods or they're not constantly asking for something to snack on because they're not hungry. And some say that the obesity epidemic in our country is because people are starving for nutrients. It's a different kind of famine that people aren't starving for food, but they're starving for nutrients and it's creating a different kind of
Speaker: famine in our country. So that is just something to think about on the nutrient dense food. So anyway, lots more we could talk about what to value in food and why. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Excellent point. Okay, so number five, stop wasting food. I know we've all been told by our own mothers that someone is starving in some third world country while we throw our food away. It doesn't make any sense to me either. But the more food you waste, the more you're literally throwing in the garbage can.
Speaker: dollars you know and that's tricky with kids because kids don't eat stuff you think oh this is their favorite meal I'm gonna make lots and serve lots and that's the day they eat nothing and you're going what is happening and I just cannot tolerate throwing away food it's so hard so a couple of tips for this do not let your children serve themselves I think my kids over age 10 are allowed to serve themselves because they are also required to clear their plate
Speaker: But my three -year -old, I'm not going to be forcing spoonfuls of down their throat. When they're done, they can be done. So I get to serve them. I get to say, this is how much you get. And when you're done, if they're hungry, when they're done, they get more. But guess how often the plate gets cleared? Very rarely. So I get to moderate that a little bit. And I think that we all know the
Speaker: The fact that we our eyes tend to be bigger than our summers Oh, I'm so starving and you keep up your plate and you're like, I'm actually pretty full now And then be careful with what you're doing with your leftovers, right package up your leftovers Store them correctly in the fridge or even in the freezer for a different meal If your kids aren't super fond of leftovers, you can save it till next week when they think it's a whole new fresh meal Instead of you know lunch the next day if that's not something they really love
Speaker: Yes, one illustration we did for our kids to show them how much food they were wasting was we took after the meal and we took and scraped all the leftovers onto one plate and then we show them the plate. Look guys, this is an entire plate of food that our family just wasted. And I mean, granted there's a lot of us and so everybody leaves a little bit, but the toddlers left a lot.
Speaker: We do the same thing. Toddlers do not serve themselves. That just doesn't go well. Another thing, I know we have talked about this on a previous episode, one of our episodes about food was, but plan for leftovers that look different than the original meal. One thing we've been doing is cooking chickens and then just
Speaker: serving the leftover chicken as chicken pot pie or white chili or chicken enchiladas or anything else that looks different from the original meal because then the kids are excited about it again. We even do that with leftover scrambled eggs instead of, you know, leftover scrambled eggs. Ew, gross. But we'll take and we'll put those inside of a tortilla and fry it in some oil.
Speaker: And the kids, it's one of their, you know, melt some cheese on their inside. And it's one of the kids' favorite meals. And they're like, oh, yum, thank you for making this for breakfast. And I'm like, huh, thanks for eating leftovers, guys. Thanks for not eating all my dinner. That's funny. Yes, absolutely. One of our biggest ways of making food stretch.
Speaker: while still being kind of different meals is that I will make a big batch of some sort of meat usually in the crock pot or the instant pot and I will just kind of keep the flavoring fairly mild and then I can use it for enchiladas one day and then I can use it for this the next day and this the next day just changing the flavor profile a little bit and we're so sneaky and our kids have no idea that we just cooked that meat one time and are using it all week long right. I will also say that this is a benefit to having chickens in our yard is that when we do have leftovers we feed it to the chickens which is
Speaker: makes me feel a little bit better than just throwing it in the garbage can. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. I'm like, well, this is going to cut down on a different area, our animal food bill, because we're feeding this stuff back to the chickens. Yeah. Our chickens are the best fed chickens in the county. Let me tell you all the good food I give them.
Speaker: Okay, last but definitely not least, number six, store and or produce your own food. Okay, so the more self -reliant we can get, the less reliant we will be on the whims of the grocery store or the supply chain. Like the last few years we have seen major supply chain shortages. You go to the store to buy something specific for dinner and it's not there.
Speaker: which is a whole new concept for spoiled Americans like us who expect to see whatever we want on the shelves day and night all year long. So we do a little bit of our own production with just the chickens, which we have eaten once. We usually just eat the eggs. That wasn't as good of an experience as we thought. Maybe we'll try again.
Speaker: We do love to store lots of food for emergencies. So this is something that has brought a lot of peace of mind to our family with a lot of children is that I worry if I were to show up at the grocery store, you know, a la COVID and shelves are empty, then what do I do? And so,
Speaker: These, if you're watching us on YouTube, these lovely curtains to the side of me are actually hiding a lot of our food storage because this is our extra room where we store it. And you might not think that that helps budget because you actually have to buy more food, but we can stock up when it's dirt cheap. So we will go to Costco or Wincor, one of those places that specializes in bulk things and say, oh my gosh, look, these cans of tuna are 25 cents this week and we buy two cases and we just stash them. And then we're basically always eating our canned goods when they're the cheapest because that's when we buy them.
Speaker: Yes, that is such a good tip. Yes, I have so much to share about producing your own food and sustainability. Obviously, I'm not going to get to it all here today. I think we have another episode planned on sustainability, but just the thought of being your own food chain. So what you're doing with your chickens, being your own, yeah, food supply chain, your own food
Speaker: from start to finish. That is something that is really empowering, really. And so if you're where we were 10 years ago, just start small. So start a container garden, plant some lettuce in a raised bed or in a, I mean, in a pot, in a container.
Speaker: put some herbs on your windowsill, just start small. And I say start small because it's kind of addicting. But start small, do something. You know, you can even, everybody could and probably should be doing sprouts in a jar. Like that is really nutrient -dense thing and everybody can do it on their kitchen windowsill.
Speaker: But then, you know, start small is a little bit bigger than just a container garden or sprouts on your windowsill. So start with, if you're going to grow some of your own meat, start with chickens or rabbits before you go on to larger meat animals. Get the hang of it, get the idea, and also you're spending less money on a chicken than you are a cow, for example, or a
Speaker: a pig. If you want to get into dairy, which I highly recommend, start with dairy goats before cows. We had dairy goats for 10 years before we ever got a cow. It might have even been longer than that. I love dairy goats for so many reasons, one being that they're not going to knock over my little kid.
Speaker: If a dairy goat doesn't go where you want them to, you can just pick them up and put them where you want them. Try that with a Jersey cow, right? Most likely, yeah. Plus they eat less. They need less space. So just start small. I also want to talk just a little bit here about learning to preserve your own food because we do so much of that. So learn canning. It does not cost very much to pick up
Speaker: Even if you didn't grow the strawberries, pick up six quarts of strawberries from a farm stand or a roadside stand and make strawberry jam, a freezer jam or can it so it's shelf stable.
Speaker: Um, dehydrators are pretty easy. You don't even have to have a dehydrator. You can do sun drying in the sun fermentation. Again, this is another one of those things like sprouts that everybody really should be doing because there's so many health benefits to it is so nutrient dense and fermenting sounds weird, but what I'm talking about is like yogurt. Okay. That's not weird. That's fermenting of a fermentation process. You can make cheese. One of the easiest cheeses to make is, um, with goat cheese.
Speaker: or a ricotta or cottage cheese. There's so many easy cheeses, but just start with an easy one. Like don't try to make brie for your first cheese. I still haven't mastered brie and I'm what, 15 years into cheese making, but just start small, but do something. It's going to, it's going to make you feel so much better.
Speaker: more empowered, less helpless about what they're doing to the prices at the grocery store or what's happening in the supply chain. Things that are completely out of your control. Grow some herbs in your window cellar. Just do something really small that will make some bikavas or kombucha. Those are controlling your own supply chain right there. Obviously, you can see I'm
Speaker: I'm talking too fast because I'm very excited about this. I can't go on and on. We're going to do a whole episode about it. We do also fully realize that it is not a possibility for everyone to grow or even raise their own food. If you live in an inner city or even suburbia with an HOA or something, you probably can't have chickens.
Speaker: pay attention to getting a little bit closer to the source because chances are your local farms are going to be less affected than the grocery store that has to truck stuff all the way across the country. Maybe you can develop a relationship with a local farm and say, hey, I'm going to get our milk here occasionally so that I know exactly what's going on. I know where it comes from, first of all. I know it's going to have higher nutritional benefits. And I'm going to be supporting a local economy and be a little bit closer, a little bit easier to get my food that way. Maybe there's a neighbor who has more land than you and you could
Speaker: volunteer to pitch in to have them raise chickens and get a portion of the eggs. There's so many different options, but the closer we get to that food production, the more likely we are going to be to be safe from the outside influences of the world's economy going like this. I'm going up and down with my hand if you can't see me. Yes, that is really the crux of things here. Think about what the world was like, how it functioned, how people ate and controlled their
Speaker: their groceries and their food supply before there was grocery stores that we went down to, right? Um, so it was bartering. So I'll do, I'll raise chickens and have the eggs and you have a big garden and then we'll trade, right? I'll give you some of my eggs and you give me some of the produce. And then if you have extra produce, Hey, I'll feed that to my chickens too. Right? So you're controlling more, but get to know your local farmers. Absolutely.
Speaker: I could tell you a hundred times when I've had too much or not enough or stories from other farmers that I know that they have enough. It's just the nature of raising animals or a garden or
Speaker: whatever, that you have more than you can use. There's plenty for others. And so get to know your local farmer, not so that you can get free stuff, but that you're like, what value can you add to them? And they can absolutely add value to your life as well. There's other things out there. We're not back in the middle ages where you have to barter for all your food. But there's other things that we have. There's food co -ops. So a lot of people go in. They buy from companies. One out there is Azure Standard.
Speaker: and they do like a weekly delivery or a monthly delivery, and you buy in bulk and then split it up at some location. A lot of people do that. There's buying clubs. We mentioned Costco, Sam's, there's other kinds of things. How about foraging? What are the foods in your area that are edible? One year for homeschool, I know I mentioned this in our science curriculum. One of my kids wanted really to know what foods
Speaker: we're edible in the woods out around us. So we spent every Friday that year in science, we were studying botany and we spent every Friday roaming the woods with the guidebook in our hand. Oh, hey, look, this is edible. Look, if we dig up the roots of this, we can take this back home and we can eat this. Obviously, know what you're doing. Okay, don't eat red mushrooms.
Speaker: Maybe bring a local guide for your first couple of times. But there's tons of things. Everybody has dandelions. And did you know dandelions are edible and really good for you? Like all parts of the dandelion, the root, the flowers, the leaves.
Speaker: Um, how about farmer's market? How about roadside stands? Um, there are so many ways, other ways that you can find food other than just going to the grocery store. And all these things are, I know we're talking about grocery budget. Some of these things do save on your budget. And some of these things put you more in control of your food source and the food production and your supply chain. And that has an immense value too.
Speaker: Yes, it's more convenient to go down to Walmart and buy it, then keep a cow and milk every day. But what about when Walmart doesn't have any milk anymore, right? Then I've still got the cow in the back pasture, just for an example, kind of an extreme one. But again, in everything that we do, we just want to talk to you guys about making intentional choices. What is just a little thing you can add in to feed that family that you're responsible for feeding?
Speaker: Yeah, there is nothing quite like the stress of laying down at night wondering if you're going to have the money or the resources to feed your family. That is torture. That's torture. And just to be a little bit more comfortable in knowing that, oh, we know where our food is coming from. And even if there's nothing at the store, we have this farmer's market that we go to. We know the local farmers are going to have food, or we are growing our own garden, et cetera. It's just wonderful. And I know we've kind of gotten
Speaker: seems like we're talking more self -reliance than grocery budget, but it all fits in. And it seems like maybe this is what has to happen in the world where the supply chain gets interrupted and inflation goes crazy before we start to realize that, oh, we need to take back some of the control of our food production. Because nutrition goes up, health benefits go up, prices go down,
Speaker: when we get closer to the source. So that's kind of where we're coming from today. But don't let this episode overwhelm you guys. Pick one thing right now. Pick one thing that could help you gain control of your family's grocery budget, make a little bit more intentional choices so that you can have the security knowing your family will be fed, even if things get scary in the future. All right, everybody. I'm Andrey. And I'm Bonnie. And we're Outnumbered.
Speaker: Thanks for listening friends. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to our email and never miss another episode.
Speaker: Oh, and do I say it? We're so good at this. I could remember if it was you, me, then you, or you. Let me start it. Okay. Okay, everybody. I'm Audrey. Sorry. I don't know why that's funny. I just literally kink. Figure this out. I'm so dumb. This is awesome with our guest. Okay, sorry. Go ahead.
