Surviving on a year-long $1000 grocery budget
Lyn Webster won’t just meet her goal of spending less than $1000 on groceries for almost all of 2018. She’s going to smash it. New Year’s Day was the Kaitaia dairy farmer’s 346th day of the challenge and with a little over two weeks left, she has $141 still budgeted.
Webster says the experience has been surprisingly pleasant and forced her into a new kind of spending discipline.
‘‘Everything about it has been positive, I’ve lost weight, I’ve saved obviously heaps of money and I’ve learned heaps of new skills.’’ She estimates she has saved $80 a week and more than $4000 over the course of the year.
It taught her self-discipline and pushed her into learning new skills. It’s made her self-sufficient as she was forced to create food and cleaning products using the ingredients around her.
Webster embarked on the challenge after a previous attempt to stay away from grocery shopping saw her being supermarket-free for 63 days in 2017.
It gave her the motivation to set the $1000 challenge. Her Facebook page ‘‘Pig Tits and Parsley Sauce’’ – named after the book she published in 2013 under the same name – has around 9500 followers who were watching her progress over the initial 63-day challenge. The book has been reprinted and is being relaunched this month with a new name, Save Make Do.
Having that audience motived her to maintain her spending discipline. ‘‘The very first post I did was that I used tea bags more than once because I don’t have an infinite source of tea any more. It just went on from there,’’ she says.
She has learned to appreciate things she used to take for granted, such as the coffee and teabags her mother gave her for Christmas.
She began making her own cheese, butter and yoghurt, as well as baking her own bread.
Any leftovers go into the loaves. She has vowed never to buy supermarket bread again. ‘‘I value everything highly because I’ve cut off that resource of just throwing money endlessly at the supermarket.’’
She resisted the temptation to kill one of her cattle to supply her with beef because she felt it would be unfair on her followers and those looking for their own ways of saving money. She relies on eggs from her chickens as well as chickpeas, beans, pulses, shellfish, wild game shot on farm and offal. She has made her own sausages. She makes her own cleaning products using baking soda and soap using colostrum from her cows.
The experience has reduced her landfill waste, partly because she bought her staples in bulk, removing the need for smaller plastic bag waste.
Webster plans to maintain her thrifty ways and be completely supermarket-free after the challenge ends on January 24.
‘‘I think for 2019, I might stay out of the supermarket forever. I’ll still get stuff because I’ve found ways of getting stuff that’s a lot cheaper – there’s wholesalers who have the ingredients that I need.’’