I know we all love to stockpile especially our freezers. I am very guilty of this habit. But I had to ask myself this week, when is enough enough? Am I feeding my freezers or feeding us economically?
Am I buying deals every week on meat and not eating much of what I already have in the freezers? Do I incorporate enough from the freezers into each meal? Or is the food just languishing there until it gets freezer burned and has to be thrown away?
Many of us salivate over a great deal like chicken breasts for $1.69 a pound. So we go and stock on 25 lbs. Then we see a great deal on ground beef at $ 1.99 a lb. and stock on that too. Before you know it, your freezer is overflowing and you can’t even find what you are looking for when it is time to cook dinner. Or you have to pull half of the items out of your freezer to find the piece of meat you want to cook or the vegetable to go with that meal.
All of this really hit home this past week when I inventoried my freezers again. I now have 95 lbs. of chicken in my freezer. I had to ask myself, is that really necessary? Honestly it is not!
I also asked myself am I really saving money or just spending week after week on these great deals and not using them up? Am I really saving money by doing this or is the “thrill of the hunt” what it is all about?
We all love a great deal but if we are not using up our stockpiles and continually buying week after week, how are we saving? When you get to the point that you are repackaging food items to make more room in the freezer so that you can squeeze another great deal in there, it is time to STOP buying! The $500. a month that I spend on food could be better used by investing it.
Sure I am on the South Beach diet so I do need to buy fresh produce for salads, some berries, and some dairy every week but not much else. Hubby is eating what I am eating but he likes his snacks, bread, ice cream, and other carbs that I don’t eat. So I can buy a few of those things for him and still not spend all of the $500. a month.
We still have a lot of carbohydrate items in our pantries too that Hubby is trying to eat through. But I rarely replace many of them.
So I am on a mission these next months to eat up what we have! Meals will be made from the freezers and pantries with salads and berries mixed in. It is going to take a long, long time to eat all of the meat, poultry, shrimp, and fish in our freezers but we are going to do it.
When I stockpile again, it will be done on a smaller regimen and I will be very careful of prices. But that is way down the road!
So from now on, Tuesday’s posts will be about what we are eating from our stockpile and an accounting on how much we spent that week on food. I want to keep myself accountable to you and myself.
I am trying to get back to regularly blogging but I get so involved in projects that the days just slip by. So I have decided to schedule certain posts on certain days so that I know what I will be posting about each day or every other day. But more about that later.
So if you are like me and need to stop feeding your freezers, please join me in your quest to use up what you have. Ask yourself the questions that I posted about above and be honest with yourselves. Your stockpile doesn’t save you any money if you are not using it. Don’t meal plan and then buy your food. Plan your meals from your stockpiles. You will save so much more money that way.
One thing that I know after almost 52 years of buying food is that there will always be another sale! So the “thrill of the hunt” will still be there months down the road.
As usual please feel free to comment or tell me that you are going to join in with eating up your stockpile and save some money for investing, to pay down your debt, or for another goal that you are working toward.