A dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to, so having a budget is more important now more than ever! In a previous post, I talked about how homesteading needn’t be expensive. I’m sure those of you who have homesteaded for a while are thinking, “It needn’t be, but it be.” Which is why I wanted to make this post! My dream is to hopefully have a larger homestead close to my grandparents.

Before that happens, there are a lot of things that have to take place first. Namely, a lot of money that needs to be saved. I want to afford a house out there and build the infrastructure (wells, electrical lines/solar, gas, etc.). Since we want to build our dream with as little debt as possible, we are saving now! As an educator, we don’t make six figure salaries with bonuses and raises being a regular occurrence. That means pinching pennies is something we are used to doing anyway.

Homesteading + educator = pennies are bleeding from being pinched!

With the cost of everything being higher, if you are just getting started homesteading, you are probably thinking of where to start that won’t cost a small fortune. Don’t forget, homesteading is a lifestyle towards self-sufficiency. To save the most money, I think the simplest place to start is in the kitchen.

When we first made the homesteading a lifestyle, I was a little more prepared to see things as an investment. We did spend some money to get started. However, the plan was to lay down the foundation so we don’t have to do that every year. With the first year, we were going to just be happy breaking even, so here are the things that I did this year to help us save money. Some of these will definitely be common sense, but still worth saying!

These tips will be focused on introductory savings techniques in the kitchen without having to spend too much money. We will talk more about how to save more in other posts, but we have to start somewhere.

*My Disclaimer: Do not do all of these at once. Start small and integrate it into normal life and live with it for a while to learn the nuances of it.*

Budgeting in Your Kitchen

1. Cook at home:

Now this is the most obvious “duh” money saving technique, but it’s a real one. Knowing how much you spend each month, especially on food, is critical to saving money on the homestead. We have friends and family who spend as much as their mortgage on food…every month.

While we go over budget on food some months, it is usually for special occasions like Thanksgiving, Christmas or we are buying extra so we can preserve it for later. Cooking at home does take time, but once you learn to love it, you can almost guarantee anything you make will taste better (and be better for you!) than the stuff you can buy just about anywhere. Once you have the hang of this tip, #2 is even better.

2. Shop sales/Buy seasonal:

Now this may be unfair for those of you like my grandparents who live 45 minutes away from the closest grocery store. They don’t have much competition, but it’s a good start. There are certainly some issues here depending on your goal. If your goal is to eat organic food/free range or locally sourced, it is significantly harder to find that on sale. While that is certainly always my preferred type of food, it’s not always feasible with our budget constraints.

Finding pork shoulder on sale for less than a dollar a pound at times is significant as that can make 5-6 meals for the family. Similarly, you can shop the ads for your non perishable items like beverages, toiletries, etc. You can also look for deals where there is a fixed dollar amount off after you spend so much money on your final bill. You may even be able to find coupons on those items to save even more!

If you are not able to shop multiple stores for sales, definitely consider buying seasonal produce. I found February and March (early spring) is a great time to find asparagus and pineapple on sale. I will buy these in absurd quantities to preserve for later. At the time of this writing, it is a day before Thanksgiving and I purchased 16 lbs of cranberries to last us through the year!

3. Learn to stretch what you cook:

This may be the harder one to implement, but it has definitely saved us the most moo-la (my poor attempt at a homesteading joke!). Two major limiting resources for most of us I think is time and money, and depending on your situation you might have more of one than the other.

Once you are cooking at home and shopping the sales, I have learned to save the most money is to get creative with some of our meals. This includes buying dry beans, larger pieces of meat (pork shoulders, whole brisket, whole chickens) and finding different ways to cook them and to use as much of what we buy as we can.

For example, every month or so whole chickens go on sale for about a dollar a pound at our local grocery store. Those chickens can feed us for at least three meals, typically one meal where we eat it roasted with veggies, another as enchiladas (great for having something in the freezer for busy days!), and a chicken soup of some kind. When we cook the chickens, we cook them both and then separate the pieces for the meals and shred the meat.

Well then we are left with two beautiful carcasses. This is something we used to throw away, but with this new homesteading goal, I have been freezing them until I have enough vegetable scraps (bottoms and skins of onions, carrot peels and celery tops also in a gallon size bag in the freezer) to make a delicious chicken stock. I will add the scraps, the carcasses, salt, pepper, bay leaves and some herbs like thyme and rosemary with some water to make the stock for a few hours over low heat.

Then I will eventually pressure can the stock. If I wanted to buy that same chicken stock, it would cost me at least $6 dollars for the same quantity of stock. Typically 4-6 quarts. I am sure it would be closer to $15-$20 if we were comparing quality (if you could compare quality of home made versus store bought)

We do the same things for our pork and beef. We trim off as much of the fat from the pork to render into lard, thereby reducing how much cooking oil we have to buy. When Labor Day and Fourth of July sales were happening, and we bought 70 lbs of brisket on sale, then we rendered the tallow down for lotions and lip balms. Now I’m not having to buy any more of those for the foreseeable future and will be gifts for the family and coworkers!

4. Think sustainable/reusable:

When we first started trying to reduce our footprint, we decided we would start with not buying paper towels and using towels/napkins and not buying Ziploc bags and using silicone reusable bags. There are a lot of benefits making these two changes and only one real con, washing them, but I eventually got over that. I can’t stress this enough, only once we had a routine of using towels/napkins and our new bags that we decided to add reusable coffee pods instead of the disposable/recyclable kind.

If you are interested in using products like the reusable bags, checkout these products in gallon, quart, and snack size that I use everyday! They are non-BPA, dishwasher safe and have been leak proof for the last 6 months (when I purchased them)!

I know these may seem like a duh to some of you. Don’t forget that not all of us were taught how to save and think about money differently. A question I like to ask myself, is “And now what”, three or four times at least!

Once I identified my food budget, I asked myself, “Now what”. Which is when I decided to cook at home more to save more. Then “and now what”? Now I want to save money on the things I’m already buying and ensure it’s on sale or seasonal. Then, “and now what”? How can I stop throwing away a carcass, the fat trimmings, and vegetable scraps? So I started finding use for my waste products. Then, “and now what?”. I have to clean the kitchen. Cleanup with washcloths and silicone bags entered the kitchen and closed the loop.

I did not realize how much I was not saving by not doing these things. Now that I have started, I don’t know if I can go back! Budgeting in the kitchen isn’t always easy, but you can make delicious and wholesome food without much work (like gardening) if you follow these steps. Be sure to check out our recipes like Easy Charro Beans Recipe for Tex-Mex Lovers and our Apple Butter for budget friendly meals and gifts for friends and family.

What cost saving techniques do you use? Have you tried some of the reusable silicone bags or reusable coffee pods? Will you try any of these tips? Want to see more tips like these? Leave a comment below!

¹ Source: Jabs J & Devine CM (2006) Time scarcity and food choices: an overview. Appetite 47, 196–204