Things I Learned Eating On $1 A Day For A Month | Hacker News Reader

Things I Learned Eating On $1 A Day For A Month

grocerycouponguide.com

82 pointsrobg42 comments

This is the most frustrating post because the majority of the text is telling you something is possible without telling you how to do it.

It reads like a timeshare brochure or coupon book sales pitch.

It's easy enough to live off $2 a meal though.

        Breakfast: Oatmeal with Bananas/Raisins/Cinnamon (no sugar though 
        - it will make you hungry sooner) and tea or coffee from whole beans
        bought at IKEA. Eggs.

        Lunch: Beans and Franks or Sandwiches with coldcuts from Costco or Pasta.

        Dinner: Pasta; Rice and Costco Dumplings; PG's Rice & Beans; or 
        homemade Pizza (cut large loaf of bread in half, add oil, sauce, cheese,
        misc. meat toppings, bake appropriately.) Homemade fries or mashed potatoes
        make for a decent side. Frozen stir-fry veggies. IKEA sells woks for $9.

        Snacks: Ramen, Costco Granola Bars, Chips.

This should give you a bit of leeway in case you want to go out once a week or buy a case of beer.

PG's Rice and Beans recipe here: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html#f1n

I'm not some anti-carb fanatic by any means, but the near complete lack of fruits and vegetables in this diet can't be healthy.

I forgot to mention loads of apples, clementines, oranges, PB&J sandwiches and the occasional salad.

IANAD, but it did get me through a summer of bootstrapping. It certainly isn't the healthiest diet, but we were hard pressed to do any better without resorting to coupon scavanging or food co-ops.

Also if you don't exercise already, but decide to take it up - the health benefits will probably more then compensate for the poor diet...probably.

That doesn't make much sense. Exercising makes you need proper nutrition even more, it doesn't make up for poor nutrition. The only way exercising "makes up for a poor diet" is if you have tons of extra calories on top of a full set of nutrients.

Click on "Home" for more detail. This is the "things I've learned" part of the blog, there's more detail.

You can also reduce costs and increase quality if you have low cost whole vegetables nearby (like Milk Pail in Mountain View) and if you like to cook the minutes spent in prep are a good break and time for discussion.

There's a long series of posts detailing exactly how he did it.

http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/eating-well-on-1-...

If you're willing to cook from mainly fairly simple ingredients, you can do it without much coupon clipping. Lentils, beans, and potatoes are dirt cheap, eggs are pretty cheap (a two-egg omelette is about $0.25 of ingredients), and, depending on where you live, there's usually some variety of fruit or vegetable in season and very cheap. Bread is also nearly free if you bake it yourself from flour instead of buying it. It'll still take some effort to keep it at $1/day, but if you're willing to do $2/day, it's easy.

what these sorts of schemes ignore is how much time it takes to clip, sort and strategize. how much is an hour of your time worth? if it's more than what you'd save by doing the extra work then to me the savings aren't really worth it (shortened version: opportunity cost matters).

http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/coupon-organizati...

false dichotomy. it is not necessarily going to the be the case that you'll be busy making money if you weren't busy clipping coupons.

You don't have to be making money for your time to be worth something. I'm home from work right now. If an hour spent clipping coupons takes away from "recreational" time spent coding for fun or in my machine shop puttering around, it's not worth it. The leisure time is worth more to me than the money the coupons would save.

again, i feel this is a false dichotomy. it doesn't always come down to making the choice of spending an hour clipping coupons or doing something you enjoy.

sometimes you have idle time and have the choice between spending 10 minutes to clip some coupons while watching tv, or doing nothing.

If you truly want to save money shopping, you need to learn how to create your meals from what you already have in your house and then buy the best deals each week to replenish what you have on hand. This allows you to purchase food at the best prices as opposed to what they happen to be when you go to get the ingredients for your menu. This simple change should instantly cut your grocery bill by 50% or more.

This is what I do. Go to the shop, see what is on special, make something out of that.

Although lately, I just cook up loads of brown rice (after soaking it in water for 24 horus), and mix it with something. Skipping breakfast and lunch helps cut down on the cost as well.

Why do you soak it in water first?

This is called the GABA method, "This process stimulates germination, which activates various enzymes in the rice."

It also makes it cook quicker, since brown rice usually takes longer than white rice to cook.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rice

I am curious what percentage of the food acquired in this manner was packaged, e.g. canned, jarred, or wrapped in plastic, and from major brands. Any preserved/processed food from major brands can usually be found at discount if you look hard enough, since it has a long shelf life (from the processing), and there's usually lots of it in stock (from the large brand).

The picture from the original lifehacker story shows lots of major corporate brands, e.g Kellogg, Mission, Skippy, Quaker Oats, Place, Wheat Thins, and Kraft. http://lifehacker.com/5560305/eat-well-on-just-1-a-day

While it's great the author was able to include some fresh produce in his diet, since accomplishing that on an ultra-low budget is quite admirable, it still looks like this feat was pulled off thanks to the quantity of waste typical to mass-produced, processed food.

If you want a more thorough guide of how to eat for a dollar a day and a personal account, day by day, of two people who did so for a month check out http://www.dollaradaybook.com/it-starts-today

cashing in coupons is not eating for 1$ per day.

Yup, and neither is buying $16 worth of non-food items so that you can get $4 worth of food items for 'free'.

Are you sure that he was doing that?

I didn't read through whole thing day by day but on day 1 he uses his food money to purchase non food items because they give him coupons worth more than what he had to pay for them in cash: http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/eating-well-on-1-...

Oops, sorry, I was misreading http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/eating-well-on-1-...

One wonders if he should have included gas burnt driving to all the places which had stuff on sale, and I definitely support all of the opportunity cost comments.

On one hand it's not the most economical use of your time if you can sell the time you spend on doing this. On the other hand if you can save 5$ by sacrificing one minute you can get pretty decent hourly rate on your effort.

Also this guy seems to be having a lot of fun gaming 'the system' and blogging about it.

Does he buy en masse, then claim that he ate for $1/day even though he has an inordinate amount of leftovers? I don't understand how he can possibly have 32 boxes of cereal (among other things) at the end. I've never seen a box for less than a dollar, and already that is over his budget.

If your job pays you say $50/hour to work, but you have to spend one additional hour each month implementing this system (figuring out what to buy, where, when, managing coupons, gaming the system, etc.) that right there costs you $50 in opportunity time, cancelling out some of the supposed savings. The problem gets worse if it takes you multiple hours per month, or your wage is even higher.

In short, I think the whole extreme min-maxing effort makes the most sense if you have a very low income job and the most important thing to minimize is your dollar outgo rate. Most professional programmers should not have to do this.

Well, that assumes you are willing to work in that hour and had the work available, but chose not to do it because your were implementing the system.

If you do this instead of watching mindless TV, factoring in the opportunity cost is inaccurate.

Good point!

But for folks who already don't watch mindless TV, or who have other opportunity projects or investments that monetize better, the argument still holds. For example, instead of putting an extra hour into one's day job, you could put an hour into making some new product or service which will in turn make you back more money than you would have saved if you did his extreme food cost reduction scheme. Or learn a new skill.

But who are we kidding? The extra hour will surely be spent reading HN. :)

Nicely said, and I totally agree. I just like to pull up examples of the opportunity cost fallacy. After all, it also overlooks the maxim that 'a penny saved is a penny plus taxes and expenses earned'.

That assumes a new product I was able to make or new skill I was able to learn in the time this takes would make me back more money than I would have saved. Not sure this is a given. Time doesn't tend to slice up so neatly.

http://www.thegrocerygame.com/ has a system designed to help you sort through the coupon 'game'. Apparently, grocery goods typically go through a 12 week cycle of being the most discounted to not being discounted at all (this involves tracking manufacturer coupons AND grocery store coupons and timing the overlaps).

My mom did this for a family of 8 which cut grocery expenses in half. I'm not sure if it will scale down to 1-3 people effectively though.

If the multiple stores you have to visit to use all of your coupons are more than a few miles apart, you fail by adding the food savings to your fuel bill plus some.

I'm quite sure that I could accomplish that. Bulk brown rice, lentils and beans are extremely economical. Combined with some greens and fruit/vegetables from my own garden plus the bounty of nature (you can walk outside and pick raspberries here, for instance).. well, that's how I eat anyway. I'd just have to give up the bags of chips and jars of salsa.

What actually more interesting is that he is able to make money from coupons: http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/eating-well-on-1-...

It's the same story. He worked for his groceries rather than working for money to spend on groceries.

yeah but in working for his groceries, it doesn't seem as though he created any value to anyone in the process.

I guess he was brand loyal, but it seems like the work didn't benifit anyone else in society, which is in contrast with actual work.

> it doesn't seem as though he created any value to anyone in the process.

Sure he did. He created value for himself by working. After all, in a pure economic sense coupon cutting is as valid work as log cutting.

Perhaps you are confused by the fact that he was working for himself? Say my current food expenses are $15 a day, so I hire that guy to shop and cook for me for $10 a day. Clearly he would be creating value for me.

Sure, but generally money is given to people when they do some sort of service for other people.

If you have a cook, you pay them to cook you food, and you got the money from some other place cause you performed some other service for someone else.

If you paid him to go shopping, thats because he was creating value for you (in saving you time) and you were paying him for it.

But this is different. Sure he is benefiting himself, but he isn't creating value for anyone else. The whole point of society to a certain extent to create a system which encourages people to help one another. This man is essentially getting food in exchange for shuffling papers around. What I don't understand is who else in society is benefiting from his paper shuffling.

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