Jen's Tips

Jennifer Johnson is a wife and mother of five children who gets her family by on a very limited budget with her frugalness. Check back here often for tips on how to cut costs during tough economic times.

When people find out we have five children, the question I almost always get first is: “How do you afford it?” Our monthly food bill is about $300, including diapers and cleaning supplies. It took a lot of figuring out to get our budget to such a low level. I'm amazed at how many people want to know my secrets. Especially during these tough times, we all need to help each other out.

This is how it all started. One day, I was talking on the phone with a friend, complaining about how much I spent on my last shopping trip. It was pretty close to $300, and all that food would only last us only about a week. That's about $1,200 a month, and to be honest, most of it wasn’t something I was proud to feed my family. There was a lot of convenience food and a lot of food with tons of preservatives.

My friend asked me, “What if we have a challenge between the two of us? You know cut our grocery bills by half and just see if we can do it?”

I jokingly responded: “I guess the kids only need to eat once a day. Take $300 cash, put it in a bank envelope and see if we can make it last a full two weeks.”

Well, anyone who knows me will tell you that I really like to win. So, with notebook in hand, I hurried to the kitchen as soon as I hung up to figure out where I could cut costs and which items I could substitute with homemade things that are both healthier and cheaper.

This was my first list:

Bread – 50 to 75 cents to make a loaf of whole wheat bread with zero preservatives. At the store, I usually paid $2.50 for a loaf filled with unhealthy preservatives.
Soda – We needed to find a replacement or switch to a store brand. Price was $3.50 per 12-pack.
Cookies and dinners– All together, I usually spent $15.
Paper towels – For a 12-roll, I spent $13. We needed two packages.
Proteins – We were using meat as protein, and very little else. That was about half of the weekly grocery bill.

Bread

I figured that five things to change were a good start. For the very first week, I made all our bread by hand. Then, as I was walking through a Goodwill store, I noticed a very nice, brand-new bread machine for just $4.99. When perusing the store's cookbooks, I found four bread-machine books. I bought all of them. Over the last two years, I have tried most of the recipes in those four books. My husband and children enjoy trying one new recipe per week. We also use the bread machine for bagels and even soft pretzels, both of which are fun for kids to help make.

Beverages

To cut down on soda expenses, we all switched to mainly drinking water. Everyone must have at least six glasses of water before drinking anything else – including myself and my husband – with the exception of morning coffee, tea, milk and juice for the kids.

Here's a trick we use: Each of our four older children have disposable/reusable sippy cups with a straw. We write names on them with permanent marker, and put them in the fridge the night before filled for breakfast. At each meal, we wash and refill the ones that were used. We only limit our kids' water consumption after 7 p.m. just to be sure there are no nighttime accidents.

On any given day, one of our children may drink:

Breakfast: one 6-ounce milk or 4-ounce juice or water
Snack: water
Lunch: 6-ounce milk or water
Snack: water
Dinner: 6-ounce milk or water; if six glasses of water have been consumed, they can either drink iced tea, lemonade or, if it's cold out, hot chocolate

We make our iced tea from tea bags, not instant mix. We get 100 tea bags for $1 at Wal-Mart. This makes about 16 2-quart pitchers, which is a great deal. For lemonade, we use 1 ½ to 2 cups of lemon juice – fresh juice tastes better, but we usually use the cheaper bottled kind – and 1 ½ cups of sugar. We mix the lemon juice and sugar in a gallon container and add enough cold water to fill the pitcher. I refresh our drink supply every night so it's ready and chilled for when we need them the following day.

Cookies and Desserts

This one was the easiest. We double a six-dozen cookie recipe, which lasts more than two weeks. What's more, we freeze whatever is left after a week. This way, I have a supply for those hectic weeks during which I'm unable to bake. Lately, we've been eating less sugary treats; rice pudding is delicious and freezes well if you make it in a large enough batch. To use up bread that'd otherwise go stale, we also make bread pudding. We still buy Jello-O and pudding mixes because we haven't found any cheaper solutions. We usually stock up on them using coupons.

Paper Towels

I tried using store brands, but I wasn't very impressed. One day, there was a milk spill at my home, and I had no paper towels handy. As the milk was running off a table and onto the floor, I rushed to the bathroom and grabbed a facecloth. I was amazed at how well it cleaned it. As I threw the cloth in a laundry bucket, something popped into my head: Facecloths instead paper towels. The only problem: I didn't want the cloth that I used to wipe my floor used to clean tables or dry dishes, even if they've been washed. (A little OCD, I know, but that's just me).

So, I went to my local Target, which was having a going-to-college clearance. To my amazement, I got a dozen large facecloths for only $1.48. I bought 10 packages to get me through the year before the next back-to-school blowout. When we got home, we color-coded them:

Red is for the bathroom, because that's the color of the room
Brown is for the floor because a) the floor is dirty and b) dirt is brown
Green is for the kitchen walls, counters, stove, appliances because our kitchen is green
Blue is for the living room to wipe door handles, walls and picture frams
Pink is for hands and faces. Why pink? My 8-year-old says: “Because our baby is a girl and she needs the most face washing.” This makes me laugh.

When we told people about using facecloths instead of paper towels they kept telling us how “green” were were. So, we save money and help the planet? Double bonus!

Proteins

This was the biggest adjustment for us. Through my research, I learned that the great deals you see on the front of your supermarket fliers are called “loss items.” The store often takes a loss on them but makes up the money by what's purchased by lingering customers who buy additional items. We only purchase the loss items and go to cheaper stores for everything else.

At first, we resolved not to spend more than $3 per pound on meat. Soon thereafter, we lowered our limit to $2. This is for any meat, including cold cuts, steaks, hamburger and tuna. There's one twice-yearly exception: I buy one shark steak for my husband because it's his favorite. I buy one on his birthday and one on our anniversary.

We also eat two lunches and two dinners per week that have no meat. We build meals around beans. They are homemade, of course. We make two crock pots of beans per week and freeze the extra for hectic weeks. We make bean burritos, cheesy bean rice squares, nachos, and three-bean soup, quiche and egg sandwiches.

* * *

In two weeks, we had spent less than $300. In fact, we were $84.48 under budget. After I became comfortable with the above changes, I found there were still more ways to save money. I'll cover those in the future.

It started as a game, but in May my husband was laid off and has been unable to find full-time employment in these tough economic times. We have benefited greatly by being so frugal in these areas. I want to help others find relief by cutting corners and saving money in realistic ways.

I am a full-time working mom of five great kids and we are an average family, so this is very doable. It takes a few weeks to get used to all the changes, but, if you make small changes, it's not so difficult.