Shopping for Live Below The Line

It wasn’t until Sunday evening that I realized that I still needed to get food for my “Live Below The Line” project. Aldi’s was closed, Target was too far away, and Dillon’s may have been a little overpriced so my only option was Wal-Mart.

Pacing up and down the aisles at Wal-Mart, it took me about 45 minutes to figure out how do fit inside a $6 budget. Multiple times, I found myself stopping, pulling out the calculator app on my phone, and putting items back on the shelf.

For instance, a loaf of bread of the Great Value brand ran $1.15 and spaghetti was $1. Those were the first two items I picked up. While grabbing other items, my budget was exceeded and I had to go back and re-price those items. I would find even further off brand items at 98 cents for bread and 82 cents for spaghetti.

One of the biggest items on my list was peanut butter. I wanted some protein and something that was easy to snack on during the day to cure my impending hunger concerns. Peanut butter is not cheap. People warned me that price for that had grown substantially through the years. Rising food costs is one of the things I don’t pay attention to so I didn’t believe them and I was wrong. Any good size jar of peanut butter would run over $4, the smaller jars were $2.40 or so. Hiding on the bottom shelf in the corner was a jar for $1.92. Very sneaky, Wal-Mart.

One of the biggest decisions for me was whether to buy tomato paste for noodles at 66 cents or canned “meat flavor” spaghetti sauce for 92 cents. I went with the latter in hopes of adding at least a little flavor to the meal and having the bigger can last me at least three days.

The deal of the day was the two bananas. They were half off until midnight; two for under 20 cents. After checking out, I had a little under a dollar left so stopped by Dillon’s to see what I could get. It was between a bag of rice and a can of vegetables (the frozen kind would have put me over my budget). I went with the rice.

So $6 and four days, this is what I’m going to be eating: