Stockpile on a Budget

From my earliest memory, each summer the women of my family were busy  "Putting something by" as my Grandmama always called the annual summer activity of canning and freezing foods.   We pretty much lived off the produce for nine months or more from what they put up each year from the gardens and I can seriously not recall one family member who didn't have a garden.

After I mentioned my personal desire to have a year's supply of food on hand in my home, Jessica asked how one went about building a stockpile, especially if you were on a tight budget.



I'm going to start with the 'putting by' part first.  If your family enjoys fruits or vegetables and you're blessed to be given produce from someone's garden, then try to put some of that up in the freezer or can it.  If you're not sure how to can or feel nervous about it, I'm sure there's someone you know who knows how and will be willing to help you learn.  In the early years of my first marriage,  I had a tight budget, sometimes very tight.  I learned quickly to accept the half a wild hog, the deer meat a hunter didn't want or the peaches I was told I could cull from an orchard.  I also went out to forage: blackberries and plums and huckleberries (a tiny blue berry) grow wild hereabouts, as do scuppernongs and muscadines.  I picked and froze fruits and made jellies.  It was a huge help to building my stockpile.  I also picked up pecans each year and would shell those out.  The happy bonus was that I always had a little something to give as gifts, too.  Not too many people I know don't welcome a jar of homemade jelly or a pound of shelled pecans or fresh blueberries!

In order to stockpile using the traditional stores,  I found it easiest to look for great sales and then allot  a certain amount each pay period to stocking up on one or two items that were on sale.
Personally, I'd start with the basics.  Baking supplies and basic canned foods are always useful in a stockpile.  If you can't buy six of something, by what you need and one or two extra.  Continue to do that every pay period and you should have a stockpile started before long.

If there were just $5 a week set aside  to use to build a stockpile, one could do quite a lot with just that small amount!  For instance:  This past week while shopping at Aldi, I bought sugar at $1.39 for 4 pounds.  With $5 to spend, I could get four bags of sugar, or about 16 pounds.   That's a pretty good start on a stockpile!  Flour costs roughly the same in a 5# bag at Aldi.  So  I could buy 4 bags of flour for $5 the next time I shopped. 

In other grocery stores, rice or black beans can be had for $1 a pound bag (and sometimes for far less, if you shop around), so that's 5 pounds of black beans for $5.  If you look around at various stores, you'll likely find that the more rice you purchase the less it costs.  So you could easily add 5 pounds of rice without spending $5.

The biggest thing in building a stockpile is to what you typically eat.   If your family doesn't eat beans and rice, then don't buy it!  Perhaps they love pasta.  You can easily buy 10 pounds of spaghetti or macaroni for $5.

Do you think your budget is too tight to even consider the $5 a week method?  Then set aside all your spare change and use that to stock up at the end of a month.  John and I used to pool our change and we seldom had less than $10 a month in change and often far more than that.  We managed to save quite a substantial sum each year on our tightest budgets, so I know it can make a huge difference.

Earlier this year I had a series of posts " Eating Well On a Budget."  In the first scenario I presented  I started with NO stockpile and bought food for my household on a very limited budget.  In each scenario thereafter,  I ended the period with a small stockpile, though I'd not had any money to buy extra food. In  January 2017 leftovers were non-existent but at the end of February 2017 I had enough leftovers to actually call it a small stockpile.  I made up these challenges through March of 2017, with slight increases each time in my 'weekly' amount to spend.  I think that is proof that we can build a stockpile if we don't have any money to spare.

Another method we used in the  past was to take a portion of a windfall amount or $100 or so from our income tax return and use that as stockpile money.  That income tax refund portion fed our kids all through the long summers when we needed to provide that midday lunch for them.

Just this year I asked for $100 from our income tax return and used that to stock up on laundry and dish detergents and the few cleaners we use in our home.  I even managed to stockpile plastic baggies and trash bags with the funds I had and then turned $10 back over to John that was leftover! 

One of the bloggers I mention later in this post, Brenda, often uses gift cards given to her at Christmas to add to her stockpile.   It's truth that you can buy food of some sort in just about any store these days.  I've purchased food items at Ross and TJ Maxx.  They might not be the traditional food items but a bottle of really good Vanilla can be purchased in these two stores, as well as coffee, tea, jellies and jams.  I once bought all the bottles they had of a lovely lemon curd for about $1.50 each.  Those jars translated into some lovely desserts over the months after I bought them.  Drugstores too can be a great source for food items, far more practical ones than at TJ Maxx or Ross, and don't forget Target stores.  We don't have a super Target but there's quite a variety of foodstuffs there.  A gift card to that store could nicely plump a stockpile.  I bought flour and chocolate chips enough to last a full year there after Christmas a few years back.  A year's worth!  I didn't spend over $30 on all that and what a boon it was to my pantry.

So you see, it can be done on a budget and it can be done in increments.   The main thing is to start where you are...

If it seems frivolous to set aside even a small amount towards stockpiling each month, I have to share this one thing that keeps me mindful of our own stockpile.   For a six week period, quite a short time really but it didn't seem so at the time, I was unable to buy any groceries at all, other than fresh milk and bread.  My family ate from the pantry and freezer every single day of those six weeks.  It was mighty slim at the end of that period but it kept us fed.  It taught me a wonderful lesson about a stock pile.  It's like having an emergency fund, not of cash, but of food.  That's why my current goal is to build ours up to a year of foods.   If experts think we ought to have six to twelve months of our salary set aside to cover our expenses, how much further could we stretch those funds if we also had a year's supply of food on hand?

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the practice of using free offers, coupons and rewards cards to acquire free items for the pantry.  This past week there was an offer in the CVS sales sheet that would have allowed me to get a tube of toothpaste FREE.  Sadly, the coupon I had didn't allow me to buy the formula I use but just the formula that I always have a reaction to using.  That was my only hold back on getting that item.  At Kroger this past week I happily picked up my two free items while I was in the immediate area shopping.  I added  a box of macaroni and cheese to our stockpile this week and put a protein bar in the diabetic pack I keep in my purse at all times.

Don't overlook either your ability to make your own foods.  I've been making my own yogurt now for the past 8 months.  I'd done it before but stopped and then I realized that I'd rather make 3 pints of good tasting yogurt for the cost of half a gallon of milk, about 85c this pay period and a starter of plain yogurt.  It takes half a  six ounce cup of plain yogurt for starter, about 33c in my grocery.  I freeze the other 3 ounces and save it for the next time I need a fresh starter.  In between times, I can use a 3 ounce portion of my homemade yogurt as starter.  So for about $1.05 I get 3 pint jars of yogurt and the next time I make yogurt it costs me just 85c, or whatever half a gallon of milk costs, to make the next 3 pints.  That's about fifteen 6ounce servings of yogurt by the way, for 85c...Not a bad switch to make financially.  If you typically buy yogurt by the cup and you start making your own, you can use the savings towards building our stockpile.

Oddly enough, the larger your stockpile the less money you'll find you spend on groceries over all.  You'll be in the position of buying foods only when it's at the very best prices.

There are many good blogs out there to help one understand how easy it is to build a pantry or stockpile.

Brenda at Coffee, Tea, Books and Me blog has a series of posts called Deepening the Pantry that is an especially good resource for those on a budget.  Brenda's lived on a tight budget for a number of years and she's used several methods to help build her pantry.  Read through Saturday Pantry  as well if you'd like to read further information from Brenda.

Brandy at http://theprudenthomemaker.com/ is a great resource for feeding a family on a tight budget.  Not only does she feed her family, she stockpiles food as well.  A great deal could be learned from Brandy.

And then there's Annabel who started getting serious with her pantry one year and had completely built it up and filled it full in just a few months time, simply by 'doing the next thing.'  The link leads to the portion of her blog she's tagged 'Pantry' but I by no means limit yourself to just that.  Her blog is a wonderful resource on living frugally and well, something I'm rather fond of doing myself!

I hope I've encouraged you to build your stockpile.  You really can do it in increments, a little at a time, for just a little money each month using all of the above mentioned methods.