<p>dstark: “How does a family of 4 spend 8,000 a year on food?”</p>
<p>Easy. S’s 8 month (a school year) food bill from school is more than that.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>I meant spending $8,000 or less for a family of 4.</p>
<p>No restaurant or fast food meals. Or starbucks. pack lunches. no prepared foods. no soda. eat a lot of rice, potatoes, dried beans, oatmeal bought in bulk, maybe from a co-op where you work to offset some of the cost. bake your own bread. grow your own vegetables. can the extra. keep chickens for eggs and meat. catch fish.</p>
<p>It is possible. Lots of people do it. Even some not on limited incomes.</p>
<p>I am not sure it’s all that great for the economy.</p>
<p>Or less?? I can’t imagine spending that MUCH! Lol</p>
<p>Uhhhhh…</p>
<p>I wasn’t really thinking about people who grow their own food, or work for their food.</p>
<p>Romani…</p>
<p>You spend less than 2,000 a year on food?</p>
<p>That is less than 6 dollars a day.</p>
<p>Yes… I spend less than $200/month on food for two people.</p>
<p>What do you eat?</p>
<p>I think there are quite a few sites on the internet that discuss feeding a family for less than $8000 a year from a regular grocery store. A friend wrote a book some time back about how one feeds a family on a very limited budget and it doesn’t include growing or working for food. It’s a very step-by-step guide. You begin by stocking up on basics. Meat is stretched over several meals.</p>
<p>Pasta, cereal, fruits, veggies, sandwiches, bagels, etc. I’m a vegetarian and I stay away from junk food for the most part. I also prefer water to most sugary drinks. I don’t eat sweets in general. I’ve detailed before how I eat for pretty cheap. I don’t go hungry and I use coupons and 10 for $10 deals whenever possible.</p>
<p>Romani I think you should do us a service and post a few weekly meal plans so we can learn from your example.</p>
<p>Actually, I think you should fly out here and take over my personal meal planning.</p>
<p>
It’s small - two-earner families get up to a $3600 credit against their income on FAFSA, which can lower EFC by as much as $1692.</p>
<p>This is an impossible game, though. I’m smart enough (IMHO lol) that I could have been a doctor. Should the formulas somehow account for the fact that I could have had a higher-earning occupation than I do? Should a lawyer who became a D.A. be penalized because be could have been a highly paid privately practicing lawyer instead?</p>
<p>Shouldn’t we be looking over your entire career’s earnings to calculate what you “should” have been saving for college? That sounds like a fun form to fill out.</p>
<p>Why should people be rewarded for having their children close together? Why should people be punished for having their kids farther apart?</p>
<p>You could do this all day. The formulas are a compromise that have to cover everybody. Some people win, some people lose.</p>
<p>Same here Romani, pasta, rice, chicken stretched over several meals. Never meatballs, just meatsauce…a hint of it. Yogurt, skim milk (skinny cow not fat cow), all treats were home made…qualified for free and reduced lunch (kiddos made sure they had enough for later in the day as well). No steak, fish if we caught it and shopped the local farmer’s market.</p>
<p>Coupons, 10 for $10, BOGO’s and Walmart will price match any other’s store ad so no driving every where. Reduced bread and reduced meat.</p>
<p>Had to feed 5 kiddos, 3 football players.</p>
<p>No soda, no coffee, no juice, fast food limited.</p>
<p>Bought my Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey’s same time every year, frozen not fresh (unfortunately). Local store always has them for $.19-$.39 a lb (3 day sale only), I am usually waiting at midnight to pick out the biggest one. 25 lbs +. We eat on that for quite some time. Left overs, turkey enchalidas, turkey casseroles, turkey omelettes, turkey tacos.</p>
<p>Couple of times they have run a similar special on the hams or clearance them after the holidays and those will last us for weeks if not months.</p>
<p>So yes we lived on less than $8000 for food for a family of 6, much less.</p>
<p>Kat</p>
<p>The best definition I’ve heard was from SNL: The poverty line is that invisible line that falls somewhere between Target and Walmart.</p>
<p>Lol zoose, I’m a terrible cook. I don’t want to kill you guys.</p>
<p>Today for example I had a bagel and a peach for breakfast, some mixed fruit and (raspberries were a dollar this week! I almost died of happiness!) and a veggie sandwich for lunch, and when I get home I’ll have pasta with lentil salad. For snack I’ll make some bruschetta or something. All super cheap. I think I eat less than normal people and food is relatively inexpensive. I remember living in California and seeing their outrageous prices for terrible corn.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that grain prices are going to skyrocket while meat prices fall. I’m afraid to see what this lack of rain does to our food prices… Sigh.</p>
<p>engineer4life–I WISH our instate was only $20,000, our flagship is over $25,000. It’s less expensive to pay OOS at several state school for us than it is to pay instate.</p>
<p>As for financial aid, unless someone has a lot of very liquid cash, fin aid is mainly determined by their income so someone making $200,000 and spending every dime will have the same as someone making $200,000 put putting away a lot for retirement in 401k’s, etc.-roughly. If they don’t own the apartment, that will help them a little bit, but not as much as any equity they give up owning a house. If the full-ride scholarship is merit based only, who cares how much someone earns, the kid doesn’t make the income and the student did all the work to earn that full ride. If you think they are high income earners and are getting a full financial ride, you are just wrong.</p>
<p>Romanigypsyees, and Katwkittens…</p>
<p>Very Interesting, thanks.</p>
<p>That’s 20k tuition only up from 11k this year</p>
<p>notrichenough - thanks for the info.
I agree that it is complicated. I like that the focus is primarily on income and less on savings. It would be foolish to disincent saving!
I would hate to think that a second parent is disincented from working in order to get more FA. One of my neighbors (with a kid going to a school with a big endowment) said she should have quit her job a year ago to get more FA now. Between taxes and less FA (versus if they had a lower income from her not working), working outside the home did not “pay.”</p>