August is "poor" month

We have done LAWKI month for the last few years, living on food storage and whatever was left in refrigerator and freezers. This year, I thought it would be interesting to try something a little different. This has nothing to do with our financial situation. It is purely an exercise. While I know that pretending to be poor, knowing that there is plenty of money in the bank, is absolutely different than actually being poor and worrying every day where your next paycheck is going to come from, I still thought it would be a useful exercise for me and my kids.

Yes, I have been poor before. When I quit my job at the university and even a few years before that, we were very poor and lived on about $200 a month in groceries. We had a little help from WIC and from family, but it was hard. I still remember when I was able to afford to buy things like disposable diapers and Ziploc bags for sandwiches instead of the cheap fold over kind. Those are still two of the hallmarks of wealth to me now. I used to remember hearing people complain that they couldn't buy disposable diapers with food stamps and I did not have much sympathy. But it's been a long time now and my kids really don't remember being poor. Since the economy is so bad and so many people really are poor, I wanted them to have a glimpse. I will share a few of the experiences on a weekly basis.

I took all of the kids grocery shopping. Unlike during LAWKI month, when I only counted food as what we were not allowed to buy, the $250 budget for the month is to cover both food and groceries. I explained what I counted as groceries, essentially disposable household items. School clothes did not count. Yeah, I know, that makes it easier. Also, I have set aside another $200 for school supplies, which the kids are already complaining about.

We went to the store (Walmart) with a list and as usual, we realized a few things that weren't on the list that were necessities. One of the things my son the foodie (14) wanted was butter. I have in the past been a butter snob, but I took him over to the aisle and showed him that butter cost three times as much as margarine. He insisted he still wanted the butter because you just had to have butter to make good food. I pointed out to him that one pound of butter would cost over 1% of our monthly budget. Did he want to reconsider? The other kids were divided. 11 was on his side, wanting butter. The other kids thought that it was ridiculous to buy butter at that price. They argued for a while and eventually we bought 2 pounds of butter and one pound of margarine.

We also bought eggs and milk. And we went to a thrift store to buy bread. The white bread was 50 cents a load. The nice wheat bread was $1.50 a loaf, even at the thrift store. So we bought 20 loaves of cheap white bread, which I hate. This was a good lesson for me about how expensive it is to eat healthy food in America today. It makes no sense that more processed food is cheaper on one level, but the larger supply I guess is the reason and also the fact that it lasts longer and can be shipped more easily. We also bought some fruit that was on sale, including some smaller bananas (I figured the smaller ones cost last per each, and that's how we usually measure them at home), nectarines and peaches which are on right now, some salad and some tomatoes. Also 5 ears of fresh corn at 25 cents a piece.

What we couldn't afford: apples, green peppers, cucumbers, meat, cheese, cream, yogurt, any snacks that were store bought like chips or crackers or cookies, or chocolate chips. I told the kids I would go to Costco and buy some of those items at a cheaper price later in the month.

On to the non-food items. 14 needed contact lens solution. I told him to go and find some and bring it back, which he did. But he neglected to check the price. I pointed out that he had chosen a double pack and that he had picked the brand name. He insisted that he had to have the brand name because that was what the doctor had told him to buy. It was a prescription, and besides, he claimed, it wasn't a grocery because it was medicine. I told him that poor people have to live on a budget and that it didn't matter if they had to buy medicine or not. They still only had a certain amount of money to spend. He argued that they would have health insurance that would cover the expense. I had a good laugh at that and told him that poor people often have no health insurance. This was beyond his comprehension and he told me that when he was grown up, he would definitely have healthy insurance. And the kind that would pay for his contact lens solution.

15 also wanted some non-food items, including her expensive shampoo and conditioner, which keeps her damaged hair looking beautiful, and some new foundation and other makeup for school. I told her those things were simply not in the budget at all. She could use the regular Suave shampoo that the rest of us use and the Suave conditioner. She could not handle this. Her solution was to say that she would buy those items with her own money. This seemed reasonable to me. Poor kids might get jobs of their own to buy their own things. I did mention that they might also have to start buying food and contributing to other household expenses, like heat and electricity, but I didn't take it that far.

Yesterday I went to Costco to get cheese. I bought one pack of cheddar and one of mozzarella, figuring we could make a lot of pizzas and quesadillas. I also bought four packs of flour tortillas, a pack of bananas (larger ones). What I didn't buy: toilet paper, lunch meat, eggs, meat. I did buy some school lunch drinks. I also bought some chocolate chips and vanilla. I thought as I did so that if I were poor, I would not buy chocolate chips in 10 pound packages, no matter how inexpensive they were per pound because I would never have that much cash up front. I decided to buy cheaper toilet paper in smaller amounts for the same reason. And the vanilla was a splurge I shouldn't have made. Cheap vanillin would have to serve in any normal situation.

For dinner last night, we had quesadillas, home cooked pinto beans (cheap source of protein and iron), frozen corn. And we ran out of salsa. We also have already run through all of the fresh fruit that I bought three days ago. Luckily a friend of ours gave us some apricots from her tree. We appreciate the bruised, tiny fruit a lot more now. I made up some chocolate chip cookie dough using oil instead of butter or margarine (too expensive) and put it in the freezer to take out for snacks later since we can't afford any other snacks but what we make on our own.

I have now spent $150 of our $250 budget for the month and it is only the 9th. We'll see if we can make it through. We will be eating lots of beans and rice this month because well, they are cheap. It turns out that LAWKI month menu and poor month menu are not very different.