Fall season is approaching, and I am feeling at home once more as I pull out the fall decorations and Halloween decor over time. This year, I decided on throwing a Halloween party for my teenager and his tutor who has become a close family friend to the both of us. Every year I get a bit more comfortable spending a bit more money on experiences that make us smile, laugh, and bond closer.
Before then, we always found ways to bond without spending as much, such as weekly Friday night movie nights where we would go to the grocery store and buy whatever snacks and choice of dinner we wanted for the long night of back-to-back movies.
Food is one thing that I struggled with setting a budget for on and off because of food insecurity in my own childhood. I didn’t want my son to have the same experience, although as a single parent, there was a time when that had become the case.
Those were the nights I went to bed without eating while making sure he ate. As I write this on a naked desk that just holds my laptop, Robert G. Hagstrom, Jr.’s book The Warren Buffett Way: Investment Strategies of the World’s Greatest Investor, and a single sheet of paper with goals for this blog printed out, I can’t help but smile about how here I am with my own investment fund and cash savings in the bank from years of frugality and making choices that the average consumer wouldn’t—not to knock anyone for their own financial choices.
For me, it feels nice to know I have put my household in a financial position where it would take a catastrophic event to put us back into our previous predicament rather than a minor emergency, which is why it’s important to always save for tomorrow even if everything is going well.
Going back to the food budget, during 2019, I was able to feed my household on $200 a month for a year when I first started my financial journey to become financially stable, but along the way with the pandemic and the rise of food costs, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma as our income wasn’t growing at the same rate as inflation.
Rising food prices were beginning to remind me of the times when food had become a scarcity towards the end of the month, just years prior to when I set out to become financially independent in the sense of not having to worry about a loss of income in a short amount of time. I found myself on the defense of not wanting to go back to survival mode, and this caused me to not be as diligent about a food budget for numerous reasons.
One, I didn’t want us to feel like we were back in the same position, because this would have disrupted forward movement on morale, two, there was an adjustment period to rising food prices and trying to figure out a budget on a low income, three, I am raising a teenager, and I want him to have his fun Friday night game nights while snacking on a bag of $6 Doritos when movie night isn’t going on.
Now, currently as we approach my favorite time of the year, I find myself putting the investment fund front and center of our life over going out for random trips to the grocery store, and the kid is okay with this too as he understands that this doesn’t mean sacrifice our traditional Friday nights, but it does mean being more intentional about buying what we buy and looking at sales, so we might not get the exact chips we want but we will get chips that we like and are on sale.
He likes Doritos, I prefer the sour cream and cheddar Ruffles, sometimes his are on sale over mine or mine are on sale over his—either way that is how it goes, and we end up buying the bag on sale instead of two separate bags now, and for two different flavors of drinks, we find what is on sale that we both enjoy, which luckily for me is Crystal Light when we want juice and none of the 100% fruit juices are on sale.
Having $5 coming out of the bank account every day and going towards the investment fund daily for the rest of 2024 also has me making sure we aren’t just putting random ‘sounds good’ items into our cart. I find myself walking into the store with exactly what we came for and in and out, which means sometimes leaving with one item no matter how far we traveled.
Riding public transportation, sometimes you feel you need to justify the cost of time and make the trip ‘worth’ its own weight, however, now having a bus pass that my college pays for and centering our life around the investment fund, there is no desire or pressure, so to speak, to make a 30-minute trip worth it.
It’s now either get what is on the list or wait until there is a list long enough to buy several items that are staples in our daily lives. Again, coming from a background of food insecurity in childhood with a brush with it in my own home, it was quite a significant personal milestone to put the investment fund over all else, including groceries, as this had been the narrative…
“There is no limiting cost when it comes to what I am willing to spend on food to make sure we never end up or feel like we are in that position again” to “I am putting the investment fund first outside of shelter.”
This is not to say that we don’t have groceries in our budget or that food will be sacrificed, but it means everything outside of shelter, utilities, etc., that can be flexible will be built around the investment fund.
Of course, life happens, and things are subject to change, and if it ever came to choosing between food and the investment fund—life and death—food will always win. With that being said, oftentimes food is the biggest expense for consumers and we often overspend, contributing to tons of wasted food we throw out every year in the states.
Although Pumpkin Spice Cheerios never hurt anyone and sound good right now – but we wait for them to go on sale before we even think of picking up a box. We did already pick up some pumpkin spice bagels for $3.99 on sale – they were a hit.
Fall always puts me in a good mood, so who knows what I will cover next on this blog. I didn’t expect this post to turn into writing about the cost of food and how it relates to our financial journey, but here it is. It’s also the one season where our “fun” budget for decor is a bit more loose which I never have regrets because it’s a family tradition to enjoy this season over the others.
I still have a month left before I am taking fall classes needed for undergrad, which means I will try to write on here as much as possible before life gets busier again. If anything, I might write more posts like this one as I enjoyed writing it.
The Broke College Student 
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