Living Within the Means God has Provided for you.

I have been a stay at home mom since 2003, although living on one fairly small income has been challenging, God has always provided for our family. With a Gross income of aproximately $20,000 we own our own home, actually have two running vehicles and want for very little. Lots of people complain about not having enough money to pay their bills. I have a hard time understanding why. On a monthly basis, we make a mere $1, 356, I had no clue til recently how low that really was. Its funny, but being Poor is more of a mentality than an actuality for most of us.

Friday, November 9, 2007

The Sorted Pantry

Oh how I would love a REAL pantry, but that's not going to happen for a while, and when it does, it will be a space saver version in my kitchen (we plan on removing some useless cabinets to place two prefabricated pantries in that area)

In the meantime, I use the closet that is under our stairs as a pantry, it holds a short and a tall set of metal wire shelves, I also have a set of these shelves in my kitchen, they are strong and hold quite a bit. I got them in store for about a third of the cheapest I can find them online though.

In my pantry right now, its a bit naked as we have been living out of it a lot this past month since we are trying to avoid dipping into the savings account.
We have
2 cans of Tuna (will be replaced when I find it for under 50cents a can)
4 cans Re fried Beans
5 cans Kidney Beans
1 can Chili beans
3 cans Black Beans
2 cans Great Northern Beans
2 cans Pork and beans
3 cans baked Beans
1 can vegetarian beans (pork and beans with no pork)
Can you tell we use a lot of beans?
5 cans Mushrooms
6 cans Corn
1 can Potatoes
1 can Sauerkraut
1 can Peas
2 cans Pineapple
and about 8 jars home canned Peaches
5 bottles Barbecue Sauce
1 jug cranberry Juice
1 container Miracle whip
1 5lb bag All Purpose flour (I also have bread kits for my bread machine out of a 5lb bag of Bread flour, 1 5lb bag of Rye Flour)
3 cans Green Enchilada sauce
2 containers Bread crumbs
2 6packs of Kroger Soda
1 jar of GOOD peanut Butter (1 jar of Peanut Butter Cookie Peanut Butter too)
several cans of Beef Broth (I couldn't get at them to count them without knocking the stack over, but I should not need Beef Broth for another year or so at the rate we use it, lol
We also have 6 cans Cream of Mushroom soup
4 cans of ready to eat soup
and 3 cans of Chili (lazy mans Nachos)

We also have 5 hamburger Helpers (yuck)
5 pasta roni, 7 boxes macaroni and cheese, 7 rice a roni, 5 packets onion soup mix, and 1 packet spaghetti seasoning.

4 boxes pasta, 1 taco shells hard, 1 flour tortillas, 32 oz quick oats, and one box of Frosted Flakes (til tomorrow when they get used to make treats)

And that is the total of my pantry. Tomorrow, after I go shopping for my empty refrigerator and freezer, I will share those lists.

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