Pfft.

I was poking around various blogs and links today and I came across this article: Can a family eat on $100 a week? Now, without even reading past the headline I knew that the answer is yes, of course so (something that would have shocked me 3 months ago). My past 4 weeks of grocery shopping have ranged from $71 to $94, and even adding a milk run (2/$5 at Stop & Shop) we're under $100 weekly.

But as I read the article, it sure seemed like the author was turning up her nose on frugality. With a family of two adults and two children (one of which is a toddler) she normally spends $250 a week on groceries. Her $100 budget doesn't include cleaning supplies or paper goods because "there's no room". Really? She claims that she had a hard time providing her family with healthful meals on $100, and she complains that if she wanted a dessert, she had to make it herself. Poor baby!

In the end she decides that while she can do it, she doesn't want to do it again. She sent more than ever the next week to make up for the deprivation she suffered in that one week.

Well... it's nice that you have a choice! It's nice that you can choose whether or not to save the money. If I had that choice, I don't know that I'd do all of this work either. It's NOT easy to shop sales, combine coupons, stockpile, and plan meals based on what's on hand first. But for us, it's so amazingly worth it. Our grocery savings have started to spill over into other categories- Tom needed a new coat and some other items, so we headed to Sears and combined a 50% off sale with a coupon and a gift card and ended up with a wool pea coat, a nice scarf, and a dress hat for $9 out of our pocket. All of the girls' Christmas presents this year (except for the American Girl Treat Seat and Bitty Baby sleeper) were on deep discount- to the point that I still have money to spend on Mia and I have no clue what else to get her.

Do I feel deprived? Not 99% of the time- only when I'm wiped out and I just don't want to cook dinner but I know I can't push that meal off one more day or my ingredients will go bad. But when I look at the bank account and we're not in the red, and all the bills are paid, that deprivation goes away fast.