Week 1 Recap: Budget Challenge

We’ll just do a quick recap of how the first week went on our challenge to eat healthfully and live within our means on a minimum wage budget.

Total Expenses

Our weekly budget should be roughly $166.75. We spent $229.82. Where did the money go?

Groceries were mostly fresh fruit and veg, with a few staples. Of that, we still have a fair bit left, to the point where I don’t feel like I need to immediately run to the store. That’s good.

Prepared food was $5.25 for a friend, the rest was due to our poor planning with respect to errands and when we would find ourselves starving. We can do better on this. It breaks down as a trip to Subway, gas station snackage, and Dominoes. Yeah….

Household expenses is where I might be being a little unfair. We need to repaint the bedrooms and hallways because we want to sell this house and buy some land and blah blah blah. If I cut out $65.94 we would be left with only the stuff we got because… the palmetto bugs are trying to move in due to the weird weather, and I despise them, so a lot of insect traps and repellents were procured with the remainder of those expenses. I’m going to include those expenses in here because, I mean, we’d still want to live without palmetto bugs and have fresh paint if our jobs were suddenly capped at minimum wage.

Gas is where I am struggling a bit in the calculations. The definition of the challenge is that after taking away the “fixed necessary expenses” which include (among other things) car insurance and gas to get to work, we have the $667/mo for “everything else” which includes gas to get to the grocery store. I calculated the gas for this as what it would cost for my Kia Soul to get to the grocery store and back, and then to Home Depot, the gas station, and back. We did do another big trip to go look at various properties, but we are doing our land search with an eye to the fact that it is too big a decision to artificially limit it for a challenge we’re doing for a website that no one may ever read.

Other cheats or things that I left out of this budget include things like buying stuff for the rental property and getting new home computing equipment and other things that come from aspects of our lives that don’t really match with the scenario of the challenge. If we were suddenly capped at minimum wage, we would not be prioritizing maintaining a website or figuring out how to make videos, and I have no concept for how we can include rental income and expenses in a fair challenge. I also left off David’s lunches this week, because it was his first week of work and he was going out with coworkers a lot, and it didn’t seem fair to either the challenge or to him to count those expenses or to make him take his lunch.

Meal Plan

I know, some of you are wondering – how can you eat a healthful diet WW style on a constricted budget. Here’s what I had, but note that David isn’t doing quite the same diet that I am.

Note: I put in the table as a figure to make it easier to read. Links to recipes for the items in blue are below.

1. Homemade cheese
2. Grilled BBQ-basted chicken breast (yeah there’s a typo in the table)
3. Thousand Island Salad
4. Slow cooker chicken leg quarters with carrots and rice
5. Marinated grilled chicken leg quarters – used the marinate overnight, but added half as much honey, just grilled until done, starting bone-side down, then flipping to skin-side down. These take longer to grill than you would think, plan your dinner schedule accordingly.
6. Carrot cake applesauce muffins
7. Lemon mustard dressing
8. Shirred eggs
9. Leftover Chicken Stew

Please note: I took advantage of our pantry and freezer. The full expenses of these first several weeks (perhaps months) of this challenge might be artificially biased to be lower until I replace some of these staples.

In terms of keeping to my WW points budget, I did fairly well this week. I used up every last one of my “Weeklies” but that was largely from binging on “endless snack night.” Because I was working from home, it wasn’t too hard to make healthy meals and eat healthy snacks (lots of tomatoes and salad that get lumped into the meals listed above). The true challenge will be keeping it going for the several weeks that we are running this challenge! I will make a post about changing routines and link to it here with an update at a future time!