When I think about whether I want to spend any of my $21 on coffee, I’m really torn. On the one hand, with such limited funds, I really want to focus on nutritional necessities (fruits, veggies, grains, legumes). I know I can do fine without desserts/sugar, no problem there. However, when it comes to doing without coffee, that could be really quite ugly. Coffee technically is not a necessity, but I’m just so used to it for normal functioning, so I’ll probably have to squeeze it into the budget somehow. If I just stick to oatmeal & orange juice for breakfast, there should be some wiggle room, because I’ve calculated the cost of 1 serving of orange juice & 1 serving of oatmeal comes out to about 35 cents (the orange juice accounts for most of that cost).

So to simplify your oatmeal question, if you plant to eat half a box of oatmeal, I think it’s fine to just charge yourself for that.

Of course, one of the challenges that low-income families face is that they don’t always have money to stock up. So, while it might be cheaper to buy the super-big size, they might only have enough in their wallet for the single-serving size. It’s more expensive to be poor that rich.

Since deciding to sign up for this, when I’ve gone to the grocery store, I’ve really started to think about what I’ll have for that week, and what will fit into the budget and what kinds of trade-offs I’ll have to make. For example, do I really need to spend around $3 on a can of coffee, and if I do, what other item will get squeezed out?

I do have a question about how to figure out what costs to include. If I purchase a container of quick cooking oats for $1, and eat one serving of that each morning for the 7 days, do I include the whole $1 in the $21 limit, or do I figure what proportion of the container I’ve eaten? For example, for the $1 container, I think it provides 13 servings of 1/2 cup each. So, do I take $1 and divide by 13 and then multiply by 7? If this is the case, the proportion that I’ve eaten would be 54 cents. Is it acceptable to do it this way, or is this considered a way of bending the rules? Is this my inner “Excel junkie” working overtime?

When I started talking about the challenge with Joan Doughty of the Community Action Network, she talked about how hard summer is for families on food stamps because there are no more school lunches–all the more so when those school lunches would have fed teenage boys!