Budgets ARE like Condoms After All

If you are thinking specifically about growing staples to reduce your food expenses, then I heartily recommend Carol Deppe's book "The Resilient Gardener". The focus is on growing large quantities of really tasty staple crops to form the core of a year round family diet.

If you are looking for ways to reduce the food budget, while still making extensive use of "normal" shopping you can usually do very well by reflecting on the choices you make.

Some obvious ones:

We eat a lot of sandwiches, and often have packets of sliced ham in the fridge. If you buy it pre-sliced you pay a huge premium compared to buying and cooking a large ham at home and carving it yourself.

Having an automatic breadmaker in the kitchen. Stock up in advance on ingredients and make bread regularly. You get much nicer bread, but you also have fewer shopping trips to stock up. Fewer opportunities to throw in an extra packet of biscuits, junk food and unnecessary goodies. And with nicer bread at home you are more likely to make nice sandwiches than buy junk during the day.

The Displaced Farmers Program is free. They have you apply for Pell Grants, and then they pay for the rest. That includes books, any tools needed, work clothes, and transportation back and forth to school, so it is pretty encompassing. They do not pay you any sort of income while going to college though, which kind of sucks. We do not have a lot of bills, but Katie's upcoming job will not be quite enough. It would be if she worked a lot of overtime, but we have (4) young daughters so I am not sure I want Katie working all the time.

I do know what you mean by sticking with welding as a career as it is in such demand right now, but I do not have much interest with continuing with that any more. Maybe it is a mid-life crisis, but I just do not see myself welding professionally. If I do anything with welding, it might be in making experimental farming equipment like the new thresher and potato harvester designs I have come up with. That would be fun, as I have always liked the thought of doing a lot with small equipment, not massive equipment. That is the trend in farming too though; farms either getting smaller, or massive in size, and the mid-sized farms going out of business altogether. But the manufacturers in the USA are pretty much just targeting the big farmers now. If I had enough money to get into that, I would probably just make the prototypes, get them to work, and then sell the patents to a manufactures. What is frustrating to me is, I see some Chinese Makers building smaller stuff, BUT they are just copies of the big equipment, I do not see people thinking outside the box and doing stuff differently. If a small farmer can get a potato harvester for $3000, and dump the potatoes into a trailer pulled by a pickup truck, they could make a profit planting 40 acres of potatoes and not 4000 acres.

I do not mind getting into Tower Climbing, a job that always interested me, and right now there are (3) companies that I know of that are hiring due to the 5G push that is going on. But Katie and I talked about it, and with her new job, I cannot see her taking care of the kids, and working, all the while I am gone from home 6 weeks at a time. I have done that before, and a person can make a ton of money doing it, but it is hard on the wife doing everything at home. If the local telecommunications company works out, while I will not be Tower Climbing all the time, I will be doing it some, but also being a Lineman. I just have to wait it out until January to see if that works out.

Travis, I haven't read every reply on your thread, but I want to quickly share some thoughts before I head out the door for work.

It looks like you're spending around $900/month to feed your family.  My monthly grocery budget is $500, and that includes food for three large dogs and six cats.  If it was just humans (2 adults and 2 children), we could definitely cut that back to $400/month, possibly less.  This is in a cold part of Canada, where milk costs around $6/gallon, and most of our fruit and veg is imported, especially in the winter months (October-April).  Typical prices would be $0.80 for a pound of bananas, $1.50 for a large can of beans, and $5 for a pound of butter.  Ground beef, on sale in bulk packages, runs around $3/pound.  Apples are usually around $1.50-2/pound, and grapes run around $4/pound and up.  

We do grow a big garden, but I don't think it saves us much money, as the things that grow the best here are also very cheap to buy at the store.  We keep chickens for eggs, and that saves us a bit of money, but again, not a ton, as eggs are usually pretty cheap.

We do cook most of what we eat, from scratch.  We also eat seasonally, buying the fruit and vegetables that are in season, and therefore cheap, and using that as the starting point for our recipes.  Right now, it's apples, oranges, squash, and root veggies, for the most part.  In the spring, it's asparagus and strawberries and eggs.  

We don't eat a ton of meat.  I normally buy less than 5 lbs of meat per week for the whole family - usually more like 3 pounds per week, though when turkeys and ham are on sale around holidays, I stock up.  Some weeks, we don't eat meat at all.  We do eat quite a bit of dairy, and eggs.  

We buy dry goods in bulk quantities when we can - rolled oats, flour, sugar, rice, and such we buy in the largest bags we can.  Usually 20+ pounds.  

I think that if you really want to reduce your grocery budget, you need to start with changing what you are buying, rather than trying to grow your food.  If you struggle to find time to cook, gardening is not going to work out well.  Plus, you can invest a lot of time and money into a garden, only to have weather or bugs wipe out your crop.  

I will say that not every meal needs to be gourmet.  In fact, you'll find the whole thing a lot easier if you plan to eat a lot of 'peasant food' - things that take one or two pots to make, produce large amounts of leftovers, and preferably don't use up too much meat.  Favorite meals around here include chili, pasta with meat sauce (though the meat is often stretched with zucchini), soup, and roasted root vegetables.  We also do lots of Mexican-style burrito meals (beans + corn + squash; meat optional, though it's great for using up leftover chicken or turkey), Indian-style lentil meals, and Thai and Chinese style stir-fry meals.  Leftovers are a life-saver - we only cook about 4-5 days a week.  Lunches are sandwiches or leftovers (I take leftovers to work), and breakfast is porridge (dressed up with applesauce or raisins and cream), toast, or yogurt and fruit.  

We don't feel 'deprived' at all with the diet we have.  It's really quite healthy, not terribly expensive, and even the cooking isn't very time-consuming.  

Having said ALL that, only you can decide what is going to work for your family.  It takes a lot of commitment to change how you eat, and if you view it in the negative (spending less money), you'll probably find it quite difficult, because everyone is going to feel like it's a deprivation.  Even viewing it in a positive light (we're going to eat healthy, seasonal, home-cooked food), it may be a big change, and not easy.  Anyone who doesn't already know hoe to cook from scratch will have a steep learning curve, both in the cooking and in the meal planning, as most cookbooks highlight fancy meals that take a lot of prep work, rather than basic food that is quick to prepare.  Personally, I believe it's worth it, though.  

“I do not mind getting into Tower Climbing, a job that always interested me, and right now there are (3) companies that I know of that are hiring due to the 5G push that is going on. But Katie and I talked about it, and with her new job, I cannot see her taking care of the kids, and working, all the while I am gone from home 6 weeks at a time. I have done that before, and a person can make a ton of money doing it, but it is hard on the wife doing everything at home.“

A couple thoughts on that-
Life is not always what we envision or want, and sacrifice is part of raising a family. If you could make ‘a ton of money’, would Katie need to work at a job? Taking care of 4 young kids is full time employment already, and it may be hard going it alone for 6 weeks at a time, but how stressful to her is having no steady household income? Maybe do it for a couple years to get bills caught up, a better financial plan in place, and money bankrolled?
Budgeting works to a point, but it’s a poverty mentality. You can’t budget your way to prosperity, you need income, and enough to not just ‘get by’ but to invest so as to create passive income. Is growing potatoes the best use for your acreage? Could the land be rented to another farmer for as much profit (but no work on your part)? Could a couple 1 or 2 acre lots be sold as home sites? Or figure out a way to build a couple rentals there? Gotta be other possibilities for income.

Julie Reed wrote:Budgeting works to a point, but it’s a poverty mentality. You can’t budget your way to prosperity, ...

No, but without a budget prosperity is far less likely.  A budget is just a tool, one that you use to tell your money where to go.  It's being intentional with your spending vs saving behaviors.  

As Dave Ramsey says none of us cannot out-earn our own stupidity.  There are people that make $500k a year and are living paycheck to paycheck and can't explain where all that money went.  There are others that only make $25k a year and have some savings.  Obviously the higher your income the greater the potential to save and invest, but without a budget even very high earning people can become flat broke in short order.

“Without a budget even very high earning people can become flat broke in short order.”

What’s needed more than a budget is financial discipline. I think a budget can be part of that for some people, but a budget on its own does not solve any problems, it just shows where the problems may lie. It does not show you how to handle money better, how to use money as a tool, or how to separate money from emotion; all things that are critical to being financially free. It tells you what you already knew- spend less or earn more.
Dave Ramsey is his own contradiction. He was a millionaire at 26 because he used money as a tool and had good financial discipline. But he set up loans using family connections at small local banks and when those banks got taken over, the new banks called in his ambitious loans and he let them bankrupt him. But his main premise was good- use money to make money. He could have gotten back on the horse and negotiated with the banks and been fine. But he got depressed, turned to religion, and took a different direction. Now he criticizes debt- teaches people to fear it, basically- but doesn’t really differentiate between good debt and bad debt. Curiously, he’s a multimillionaire because he still invests in real estate and the stock market.
He is correct that you can’t out earn your stupidity, but that points to the need for financial education and discipline. If you study people who do well financially, they do not focus on zero debt or saving a lot of money. They embrace debt, their money is working, and money is a far stronger tool than a budget. Paying off a 4% mortgage (your home) early would be stupid if you could instead invest that same money to make 10 or 15%, which is a prosperity outlook instead of a poverty outlook. A budget will not tell you that.

Julie Reed wrote:Life is not always what we envision or want, and sacrifice is part of raising a family. If you could make ‘a ton of money’, would Katie need to work at a job? Taking care of 4 young kids is full time employment already, and it may be hard going it alone for 6 weeks at a time, but how stressful to her is having no steady household income? Maybe do it for a couple years to get bills caught up, a better financial plan in place, and money bankrolled?

I can understand, and do appreciate your point, so this is in no way arguing with you, it is just there is another aspect to this.

After 8 years of being home(with a short stint at working at a bank) Katie has been home with the kids, and I think she wants to get back to work. Originally I did not want her to go into nursing again because I think it is a dead-end job. I mean there was teachers, then jobs, and now nursing as the baby-boom generation grew up and aged, and so as they die off, so will the nursing jobs, but despite my protests, she wanted to do it anyway. She graduated at the top of her class, and will take her state exam on Friday, so I am proud of her for that, and she is proud of herself too.

I traveled for the railroad for years, and it worked out well for me. But there is some drawbacks too to long term travel. The reality is, in that kind of situation, the wife tends to fall out of love with her husband because she requires love, nurturing, help and comfort, and she does not get that with a husband that is always gone. For the husband, he falls more in love with her because of guilt, and knowing she is keeping so much going. Tina and I had a really strong marriage, and after 7 years, we could not even make a distant relationship work. I do not think that is weakness on our part, but just a product of constantly being apart.

Tower Climbing does intrigue me because it represents freedom. I mean they might have all the rules in the world, but who is going to climb 500 feet in the air and say you are doing it wrong? Most people cannot climb on their roofs, let alone a tower into the clouds. You are not being paid for the work (who cannot change a light bulb?). You are paid to go where few people dare.

Income as a farmer is just tough sometimes though. A few weeks ago the bank wanted $8200, and I was able to get $9998 in 3 weeks time, so it is not that we cannot produce money when we need to, with some residual income streams, and some opportunities here and there, we have made about $62,000 this year, it is just that it is not steady income. It is good and bad. Few people could come up with nearly $10 grand in 3 weeks time, but I do not exactly want to sell off my resources to constantly do that.

That relates to our land. I could sell off some here or there, but some things are just not for sale. We have a hard time learning that in America.

I disagree, and I think if Dave Ramsey could speak for himself, he would disagree too.

No one is a true millionaire if their money is based upon a wealth that another entity can recall.

This is why Paul Wheaton brought up the topic of Gert. Katie and I are Gert's, and while we could easily sell off aspects of our farm, make money and never work a day in our life, that has never been our thing. For some it is, which is grow a business, work the stock market, and then sell at a huge profit and live off the proceeds. Good for them, and I thank Harald Alfond for his continuing generosity because he continues to benefit my family to this day. But some things are not for sale.

What Dame Ramsey insists is, "your ability to generate income, is wealth." It does not matter where that comes from, and so he is right.

For the last three years, my ability to generate income has been limited due to cancer. And Katie's has been limited due to doing 90% of the work around here while I languished. The fact that we have made it through 3 years of cancer really is a testament to having a budget, and living fiscally responsible. Cash flow has not always been easy, but we have made it.

The other aspect that people must watch out for is percentages. There is nothing simple about percentages. I want to reduce our food consumption because it is 25% of our expenses. But wait, wait, wait...the real question should be, "what is your percentage of expenses in proportion to your income?" You will actually see this if you look at my first graph, the largest category is actually "Depreciation" which is another name for tax deductions. That is a huge part of the business model of farming, and why it is of little concern for me. (And if you look closely, you will see it does not even include all possible tax deductions).

But the expense to income ratio; while important to me, is not the biggest percentage someone should always ask about. That should be, "what is your debt to net worth percentage?" If someone had asked that to Dave Ramsey at age 26, it would have been an extremely low number. Today Dave Ramsey is 100% debt free, so that ratio is 100%. This is far more important because it states what assets can actually be sold or not. If my expenses were 99% of what my income was, it would look really bad, but the debt to net worth might show I have $800,000 in gravel siting on my farm that I could always sell, or $500,000 in forest products.

But I never asked about all that. My debt to net worth percentage is really low, and when pressed, Katie and I can move assets around and have money, but my budget clearly shows that saving money on alternative power, or heating my home a better way is not going to gain me a lot of money. I need to look at ways to reduce food costs.

If I sound like a contradiction, consider this: you work hard all your life to take over the family farm, plot out a path to make it viable, in 8 years time go to full-time farming, and then...get disabled by brain cancer and unable to maintain the kind of farm that you always envisioned (sheep).

The doctor says take disability for the rest of your life, but as a workaholic you want to do SOMETHING, so you go to the USDA and then they say, "we have a program for you, what do you want to do, we will pay for it."

For me, the problem is not what is possible, but because anything is possible, what do I pick?

College
Dream job they pay on the job training for?
Transition farm to something else?

Now have them tell you they have the funding to do all three!

I can tell you humbly what happened. I went from 3 years of being underwhelmed, to be overwhelmed in 3 weeks time.

Travis Johnson wrote:
For me, the problem is not what is possible, but because anything is possible, what do I pick?

College
Dream job they pay on the job training for?
Transition farm to something else?

Now have them tell you they have the funding to do all three!

Obviously I can't tell you what to pick, and in this case there's probably no wrong answer.  But 'twere it me, I'd do the dream job they pay the training for.  Dream jobs are hard to come by, and if you love it that much you'll be far more successful at it than any of the alternatives.

If you can get them to pay for both, and doing both is feasible for you, I'd also transition the farm to something else.  It's a hedge on the dream job not being so dreamy and you know the farming thing pretty well so it's low risk for you.  

College has become so expensive, and it takes so long to complete, that in your situation (even with DFP paying the tuition/books/etc) I'd advise against it.  The caveat being that if a dream job for you required a degree to get into, then it might be worthwhile.

IMHO, and YMMV.

Just realized that my numbers are a little off in my post, but I don't know how to edit my post.  

T.J. Stewart wrote:Just realized that my numbers are a little off in my post, but I don't know how to edit my post.  

As long as you are logged in, you can hit the Edit button on the top right hand corner of the post you want to redo. If you do not see it, hen you probably are not already logged in.

A note will then appear on the bottom of the post that says, "This reply was edited 1 time". That is to alert everyone that the post was edited. Sometimes people will make a reply, another person would make a counterpoint, and then the person would go bac and change their post. Seeing that it has been editing allows everyone to know that changes were made.

But by all means edit. I do it all the time because I miss spelling and grammar.

Andrew Mayflower wrote:Obviously I can't tell you what to pick, and in this case there's probably no wrong answer.  But 'twere it me, I'd do the dream job they pay the training for.  Dream jobs are hard to come by, and if you love it that much you'll be far more successful at it than any of the alternatives.

If you can get them to pay for both, and doing both is feasible for you, I'd also transition the farm to something else.  It's a hedge on the dream job not being so dreamy and you know the farming thing pretty well so it's low risk for you.  

College has become so expensive, and it takes so long to complete, that in your situation (even with DFP paying the tuition/books/etc) I'd advise against it.  The caveat being that if a dream job for you required a degree to get into, then it might be worthwhile.

IMHO, and YMMV.

I have a pretty decent chance of getting the dream job. My career advisor's brother is the CEO of the company, and I go to church with the woman in charge of Human Resources. She said she would "do all she could for me". Together, those are pretty good chances, and then for the company to get paid for on the job training just makes sense. I just have to wait until January for it that is all. It is not far away, it is just tough for me to do logging right now. The physical demands are tough, but yesterday it was so cold (single digits in F) that my skidder did not start, and today it is even colder.

Transitioning our farm to something else is interesting. I will always farm, I am a 9th generational farmer after all so I will always be here, I am just not sure what I will do with the farm.

There really is two ways to do it:

1. Farm full time
2. Work full-time and just divert some of the money into the farm

Neither is right or wrong.

After years of farming full-time, and now limited because of the damage of cancer, I see the second alternative as being better. But my career advisor does not see it that way. He feels deep down I am a farmer and what is best for me is to continue to farm. The question is how to do it.

I never got into sheep because I loved the big fluffy, wooly things; I got into sheep because based on soil, climate, infrastructure, interest, and potential markets; sheep made the most logical choice for what I have. Now, since they have proved more work than what I can do, I have to apply the same sort of logic on what my farm should grow now.

Potatoes interests me because I have a lot of stuff to grow that crop already, and this farm grew potatoes for 150 consecutive years. Another crop would be small grains which we have also grown successfully. Either way, how much investment it will take to get into them will be the question.

I have been waiting for the experts to weigh into my situation, but that has not happened yet. I suspect what I need to do, is just go ahead and do my own Transitional Farm Plan and see if the program has the funding to do what I need. I have quite a bit going for me because neither small grains, nor potatoes are a new commodity for this farm, we are just bringing those commodities back into production. That really helps. And we are a 9th generational farm, and no one really wants to be the organization that says, "sorry, we cannot help that farm." It is actually quite the opposite, they want the notoriety of helping a 280 year old farm. I just need to sit down, crunch the numbers, make the report, and come up with the plan.

All this is no different then digging the foundation of a house. In doing that, you always ask the contractor where they want the dirt so that it will not be in their way. By doing that, you end up getting more jobs because you have made their job a lot easier. That is appreciated in a world today where everyone does what is easiest for them. It is the same thing here, no one wants (or knows how) to make a farm profitable, so if you can do the planning for them, they just have to rubber stamp (or not) what is presented to them.

By the way; this is the reason I have got $67,000 in farming grants and $160,000 in low interest farming loans, and it is certainly something others can replicate on their farms to get grants and loans too.

Tower climbing. Brings back memories. In May 2008 I hired on with a construction company as a Field Engineer. I did well and was soon promoted. By October I was assigned to take over the "MCC" for 80 wind turbines in the high desert of southern California. MCC is Mechanical Completion Certificate, or the final step before turning the unit over to the client at which point they had full control and liability for it. A lot of inspections, paperwork, punchlists, etc. I climbed and inspected every tower at least 3 times. Most of them more than that. Set the job record for fastest climb, tied for the most full climbs in a day, and had the most climbs on the project. When I wrapped up the last tower I was assigned be the Project Environmental Coordinator and at times fought to stay in the position, but that is another story. Before we wrapped up the whole project we were awarded and 10 turbine change order. By that point I was the only one left in the company with the experience to do the MCC part of the job, so I temporarily jumped back into the towers role while supervising the new PEC. The original 80 towers were 65 meter towers, the 10 in the change order were 80 meter. I tracked my climbs and had an average of 5 climbs per tower on the 80 meter. I loved the tower work. As much as I liked the Environmental Compliance side of things, I always said if I ever got out of it with the company it would be to do towers again.

After the years I spent with that company, the places I went, things I did, I can say this. Go for it. Try it. If it doesn't work out you will know you gave it your best and it wasn't for you.
It is very physically demanding work to climb a tower as you not only have to climb your weight up, but anything else you might need to do the task at hand including all PPE. I weighed my EDC for towers and averaged 25 lbs of additional gear to take with me. If it was a "Hub Wipe" It was 40-45 lbs of tools, rags, cleaners, grease, and tash bags.

Last week I saw tower sections going up the highway and then drove by their laydown yard. I recognized the lettering on them, GE 80 meter towers. Really took me back.

We did pretty well for November, reducing our food budget by 50% across 3 of 4 categories. The only one that we increased was "Dates" which is where Katie and I go on a date without children. The only reason it increased was because we actually went on one, something we have not done for months!

October Food Expenses=$1335.02
November Food Expenses=$647.50 (a savings of $687.52)

Hooorah!

Interestingly enough, we were given a big box of potatoes, and we noticed that having them, we have ate potatoes a lot. I have always put off growing potatoes because you can buy 50 pounds for $10, but I think if we grew a few ton, we would eat far more potatoes.

Freeer is betterer!

T.J. Stewart wrote:I will preface this by saying that I am a home educating mother of 11 (10 of whom are still living at home, 7 of whom do not work outside the home).  So that's a family of 12 that I shop and cook for.  Food costs could be REAL around here, if we didn't eat the way we do (very little processed foods). With Ohio food prices, I could easily feed my entire family for 400.00 a month (if I had to). My current budget is around 700.00 monthly (with splurges).

Wow! You are my hero. Where can I read/learn more about this?

Travis Johnson wrote: Well I admit that is a topic title that kind of grabs a person’s attention…Permies Click-Bait if there ever was such a thing.

This really had me laughing out loud. I too often think of titles that would make permies click bait… I think there is totally such a thing. I also daydream of catchphrases for the permies tiny ads.

https://permies.com/t/160504/sewing/fiber-arts/pregnant

Perhaps a future title should be “No, I’m not pregnant…” with the punchline I use budgets.

I think your parallel was quite humorous and realistic!

Since I’m only 1 person, I find the free version of the EveryDollar app to be good for me. In my paper planner I would hand write overall monthly costs that vary like gas & food to plan better for the following year. Before using the app I used a simple 3”x5” card. I had irregular income but like I said, only for 1 person it wasn’t as challenging to manage as for an entire family of business owner.

Happy budgeting!

Hey @Travis Johnson - since this thread got resurrected I'm curious which way you went and how things are panning out?