Can you eat on $50 a month? Sure you can, with a few lifestyle tweaks

My family of four, on average, eats for a grand total of $200 a month. Sound impossible? It's totally possible, but first you have to know what you are currently spending on groceries. I'll hold your hand, because it's pretty scary when you actually know.

The most flexible portion of any budget, after entertainment and dinners out (if those are in your budget), is groceries. When Hubs and I found ourselves suddenly living on one income, I sat down and figured out a budget that allowed $400 for groceries. I figured this was pretty close to what we were spending, but knew I needed to know for sure. I kept grocery, restaurant and fast food receipts to figure out how much it cost us to eat one month, and the grand total was staggering. We spent nearly $700 just on food. That was a number that was incompatible with our financial solvency, so we immediately:

• Cut out all food not cooked at home.
• Eliminated almost all pre-packaged foods.
• Began keeping a log of all the food we had to have, where we bought it, when, and how much it cost (per ounce).

Soon I began to notice patterns at my local grocery store. Sales repeated every three months, so I learned when to stock up. We were blessed with a small freezer at the perfect price (free), and I discovered that just after Thanksgiving, turkeys went on clearance for 59 cents a pound. That freezer holds seven large turkeys, I discovered.

Within a couple of months of finding the best prices per ounce for staple foods, following sale trends and getting back to real, homemade food instead of processed food, we cut down to $400 for our grocery spending. That's when I got creative, and shaved off another $200 a month for a sustainable average of $200 a month to feed all four of us. And that, my friends, was just the beginning.