People are stating that the article is wrong and that it is much more expensive to eat healthy than to buy a box or mac and cheese or Hamburger Helper. I could scream! Are you kidding me?

Let me just address a few of the comments I saw on this article, specifically the ones that stated mac and cheese and Hamburger Helper are cheaper.

Now, I haven’t bought either mac and cheese in a box nor Hamburger Helper in many, many years,but I looked at the weekly ads for my town and I see that Mosers has mac and cheese on sale for 2 for a $1.00 and I saw a rice mix on sale for $1.69, I’ll use that price for the Hamburger Helper. That’s just for the Hamburger Helper, the ground beef I saw on my Aldi ad is $2.89 a pound.

If you are feeding two people I would have to say that these items would feed you for two or three meals. That is $5.58 for, lets push it, and say three meals. And, we have to be honest here, one box of macaroni and cheese won’t really feed more than two people, and what are you doing eating only a box of mac and cheese for dinner anyway? I digress . . .

What can I get for $5.58?

Let me look at my local ads. Since someone who has this little to spend would also be short on gas money, I am only going to look at one store, instead of having to drive to several as I would normally do. I will use both Aldi and Mosers as examples. Aldi is a discount grocer, Mosers is a regular grocery store (much like a Piggly Wiggly if you know what they are!).

Aldi – $2.07 for 3 pound whole chicken
$0.99 for 5 lbs red potatoes
$0.69 for 3 zucchini
$0.50 for 2 cucumbers
$0.85 for 1 package frozen broccoli

Total = $5.10 (less than the mac and cheese and Hamburger Helper!)

Dinner #1 -Cook the chicken in the crockpot. Roast some of the potatoes and one whole zucchini in the oven. Give each person a portion of chicken (one leg, breast, etc per person). Shred or cube the rest of the chicken. Boil the chicken bones in water to make broth.
Lunch #1 – Make large pot of soup with half the shredded chicken. Add in some chopped potatoes, 1 chopped zucchini, 1/2 the package frozen broccoli. Mix some (not all!) the broth in the soup for flavor, add more water to thin it to last longer if needed.
Snack #1 – Eat sliced cucumbers, each person gets half a cucumber.
Dinner #2 – Make a baked potato bar. Top with shredded chicken and broccoli.
Lunch #1 – Eat leftover soup
Snack #2 – Slice the other cucumber, giving each person half.
Dinner #3 – Roast the other half of the package of broccoli and the last zucchini. Heat any leftover chicken. Use leftover chicken broth to make mashed potatoes out of any leftover potatoes.

So I got, three dinners, two lunches, and two snacks out of what I could buy for about $5 and they only got three meals? And what I would eat would be so much healthier!

Now let’s look at Mosers- $0.49 for 1 green pepper
$1.50 for 1 lb ground turkey
$0.99 for celery
$0.89 for 1 lb Vidalia onions (about 3 onions)
$0.99 for small bag of dry beans
$0.99 for small bag of white rice (get the brown if you can!)
Total = $5.85 (a bit over the mac and cheese and Helper, you could scratch the green pepper if necessary)

Dinner #1 – Chop 1/4 of the green pepper, 1/2 the celery, and one whole onion. Cook with 1 lb of ground turkey. Place 1/2 of meat mixture into the fridge for other meals. Cook rice and mix with turkey meat mixture for dinner. Soak beans for the next day.
Lunch #1 – Eat leftover rice and turkey meat mixture. Add more rice if needed for bulk.
Snack #1 – Slice 1/4 of green pepper into very thin strips and chop the other 1/2 of the celery into sticks. Eat raw.
Dinner #2 – Cook 2/3 of the beans with 1/2 the green pepper and one onion.
Lunch #2 – Eat leftover beans and veggies. Roast the last onion in the oven. Eat half and save the other half for dinner.
Dinner #3 – Cook the rest of the beans and rice and mix with turkey mixture. Eat the other of the roasted onion on the side as well as any leftover celery sticks.

Three dinners, two lunches, and a snack! Much healthier for you than Helper or mac and cheese. (Which, if you are going to eat, are healthier and cheaper if you make them from scratch) Now are these The Healthiest Meals? No, but they are so much healthier than fake cheese, and processed gravy over noodles and meat.

It is possible to eat healthier on a budget! And this example is just based on spending about $5! Imagine what I could do if you gave me, oh, I don’t know, $50 for a family of four for a week! I could go absolutely crazy!

Here is an article about purchasing food based on the amount given for food stamps, USDA Thrifty Meal Plan, and a $10 grocery list and meal plan.

If you are needing it, here are some last minute Mother’s Day gifts:

The Frugal Home book – download it right to her Kindle!

Flowers – Pick them yourself from a field or the side of the road (make sure you have permission!) instead of buying them at a store.

Homemade card – Make mom a homemade card she will love!

Give your time – One of my Mother’s Day gifts this year was the gift of time. I came down and spent several days with my mom helping her prepare for my sister’s shower next week. You could also take her on a walk, shopping, or just spend the afternoon with her.

Homemade gift cards – these can give of your time as well or have one for one free dinner, or one phone call where she can talk as long as she wants!

Make her dinner (and clean it up!) – Maybe you can’t afford to take mom out to dinner but you can make her something just make sure you do the dishes afterwards as well or it doesn’t count!

The Frugal Home hopes all mother’s, whether they be bio mom’s, step mom’s, foster mom’s, doggie or cat mom’s, or even just a fish mom, have the best Mother’s Day today!

This duplex is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath though we are only using the lower part of the home with one bedroom and one bath. We have moved some of our items in here with us and the rest is being stored in a unit across town.

We haven’t lived in a duplex, nor in town, in almost eight years and it is quite an adjustment! We miss our fenced in yard terribly though it is probably very good for us that we are made to go on at least one long walk each day with our dogs. The dogs miss being able to chase the birds and squirrels and we are having to watch out for all of the cats in the neighborhood as our biggest dog seems to want to “make friends” with them!

Our former house was pretty secluded. There are a great deal more people here! All four of us are having to get used to all of the noises or having many people and animals and vehicles around.

All of this has made us very appreciative of our prior house and appreciative of the house to come.

Our spending is also decreasing as we are now able to cook most of our meals instead of eating out which is giving us the ability to save and saving money is what we need right now! We were given an estimate yesterday of $2500 to have someone fence our yard at the new house. While this may seem like a lot, we are thrilled! We were planning for $2000 anyway but for just a bit more we are able to get the very large fenced yard we have been wanting. Our dogs will be thrilled and we won’t have to worry about them!

Where are some places you have had to live in between moving from one place to another?

We have moved 8 times in the almost sixteen years that we have been together. Most of those moves were made in the first 9 years of our relationship. These moves were often done with little to no money and often involved months of struggle after we moved to get back on our feet after paying to have utilities turned on. This move is much different.

This time we were able to hire help instead of having to do it all ourselves or completely rely on friends and family. We were able to hire people to not only help us move, but also to help us make some repairs that were needed around the house.

This time we have been able to pay someone to come out and do the last bit of yard work that needs done when we ourselves are too tired and stressed to do it.

This time we have the money to make some concessions to our buyers without major damage to our pocketbook.

This time we are able to eat out on nights when the thought of cooking was just too much.

This time we have money to put our stuff into a storage unit.

All of the financial work that we have done over the last 7 years is paying off. We will be in a better financial position than we have ever been in and boy, is it worth it! We still don’t have a new home to move into yet but we are beginning to get excited about the new life and financial future we have ahead of us.

Selling our home is much more expensive than I anticipated. There are things coming up that I would have never thought to save money for. Learn from our mistakes and make sure that you are financially ready to sell your home!

Home Selling Expense #1

Frugally staging the home for sale cost us a small amount of money. I spent $40 on items to stage our home. I had planned for this and thought it out. You could even do this for free if necessary.

Home Selling Expense #2

We all have those small things around our house that we haven’t gotten around to fixing. For us this involved things like fixing a drawer in the kitchen and replacing the pull cord to the light in our closet. We also had to fix some bigger items such as taking down damaged sheetrock in our garage and putting up new. These small things all added up to over a thousand dollars.

Home Selling Expense #3

If you do not have a new home bought before yours sells then you have to purchase a storage unit to store all of your stuff until you find a new home. In order to get a storage unit big enough to hold all of our stuff we will be spending $200 a month until we find a new home.

Home Selling Expense #4

Going along with #3, if you don’t have a new home bought then you have to find a place to rent until you make a new purchase. An even more frugal option is to find friends or family that you can stay with in the interim. For us this wasn’t an option but we are lucky enough to know someone who had a duplex available for rent that we can move into and stay in as little or as long as we need. If you are renting by the month you may need to be prepared to pay more than you would if you signed a year lease.

Home Selling Expense #5

It costs gas to go back and forth from your agents office, especially when you want to get a contract signed and move forward with a deal and not let it wait until the next day or the next time you head to town to run errands. It also costs to move all of your stuff from your old home to the new home or storage rental. Our gas bill has more than quadrupled in the last month.

Home Selling Expense #6

You may have to pay for help if you cannot find friends or family to help you move or do repairs. We had family help us move most of our stuff but we will still have a few things that we will need help moving and will have to pay for the help.

Home Selling Expense #7

Eating out is a home selling expense that you may not be used to. I know we aren’t! While I am trying to plan ahead as much as possible and have food pre-made and frozen, there have still been nights where we are just too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to do much more than stop at a drive-through on the way back home. We also had to move our freezer over to the duplex sooner than I expected which means that most of my food isn’t even at the house we are staying at.

Home Selling Expense #8

If your buyers have any idea what they are doing they will purchase an inspection on the property. The inspection is very stressful and leaves you waiting to find out what is wrong with your property that you didn’t know about. Our inspection came back with over several thousand dollars in defects. These have to be fixed before any buyer will purchase the home unless it is sold on an as-is basis, in which case you may not get as much as you would otherwise. While we expected there to be something found wrong in the inspection, we by no means expected several thousand dollars in problems. It would be a good idea to hire an inspector before you sell your house in order to find out any problems beforehand. Although, your inspection is only as good as your inspector, and what your inspector may not see the next one could see differently.

Selling a house is very expensive and you have to plan for these expenses before you begin the process of selling your house. I wish we had known and could have saved a bit more. Don’t forget that even with all of these expenses, buying a house will be an expensive venture as well!

While we haven’t received any offers yet, we have had many showings and they all have been positive. I am very glad that I put a bit of effort into staging our home to sell.

We cleaned the house, garage and property from top to bottom (the house more than the garage but that’s just because the hubby was in charge of the garage!). We repaired a few small things, such as a drawer in the kitchen, and I got rid of what little personal items, such as pictures, that we have around the house.

For several years I have been decluttering and organizing our home and it has made a big difference in getting the house ready to sell and in packing. One of the first steps in staging a home is often decluttering but because I had already done so much, this was easily accomplished.

Pictures of family and friends are not something I generally decorate with. There are a few pictures here and there but most are found in my office where it didn’t take much effort to go ahead and pack them for moving. We also don’t keep a great deal of items out on shelves so the house doesn’t look cluttered.

Another tip for staging is to purchase new towels and rugs for places like the bathrooms and the kitchen. As you can see in the picture above, I purchased several of these items to stage our home. I spent about $40 and got several items for the bathrooms and kitchen. In the picture you can see a turquoise bathmat and towel as well as a deep purple towel and wash cloth. These cost a total of about $15 and they add a pop of color to an otherwise blah bathroom.

Keeping the house clean hasn’t been as difficult as I thought it was going to be, probably because everything pretty much has a place, which just leaves me dusting and vacuuming as long as we pick up after ourselves.

How have you saved money staging your home before?

We don’t have any plans this week. I couldn’t be happier since our schedule has been so hectic since, oh, I don’t know, Thanksgiving? I may even go on a bike ride this weekend!

Here is our meal plan and recipe links for the week:

Breakfast Recipes : Meal Replacement Shakes though some mornings I’ve been wanting an egg instead.

Frugal Lunches : For Hubby : OAMC Chicken and Rice, OAMC Chicken pot pie, Quesadilla, and BBQ Chicken Sandwich

For Me : Cabbage Soup, fish and veggie bake

Cheap Dinners :

Monday : Fish Tacos

Tuesday : Meatloaf, mashed cauliflower, green beans and a roll

Wednesday : Toasted Quinoa Salad with Scallops and Snow Peas

Thursday : Veggie Omelet and Toast

Friday : Hungarian Goulash

Saturday : Master Sauce Chicken, Basmati Rice with Veggies, broccoli

Sunday : Lentil Soup and a Salad

It’s a rough life to be a dog in this house.

Who me? I’m just wanting to lay down in these nice, warm clothes.

We are continuing with the healthier eating. I don’t want to say healthy eating because I don’t know that we are quite there yet but we are making big changes in our diet and I am trying to change up our recipes into healthier versions!

Frugal Breakfast – Meal Replacement Shakes

Cheap Lunches – For Hubby – Meatball Sandwiches and Pot Pies

For Me – Soup or Salad

Cheap Dinners -

Monday – Marinated Chicken Legs, Calico Corn and Roasted Broccoli

Tuesday – Happy Valentine’s Day! Frito Taco Salad with Catalina Dressing, a fave of the hubby’s!

Wednesday – Tuna Salad Sandwich with Homemade Fries

Thursday – Veggie Burger

Friday – Hamburger and Fries

Saturday – Dinner out with friends

Sunday – Salad with Chicken or soup

Just adding primer to this dresser has already made a difference!

Click here to see it before it was painted. Crystal knobs are on order from Amazon for the top two drawers but I still have to decide what I am going to do for the bottom four drawers. I would have ordered crystal for the pulls as well but I can’t find any in the size I need.  I can’t wait to share the finished product!