A Well Stocked Pantry: "The Emergency Fund You Can Eat"

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I read a good article called “The Emergency Fund You Can Eat” on a financial website with advice about stocking up the pantry. I thought it may have some helpful ideas that might benefit some of the families here.
articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveMoney/TheEmergencyFundYouCanEat.aspx
Having a substantial cash emergency fund is an important financial goal, but it’s not an easy one. Building up enough savings to cover three months’ worth of expenses can take some families years to accomplish…

Fortunately, there’s another kind of emergency fund that’s a lot easier to put together: a well-stocked pantry.
Having just two weeks’ worth of food on hand can:
  • Tide you over through a short period of unemployment, a shortfall before payday or any other occasion when you need to conserve cash.
  • Prepare you for an emergency, such as a natural disaster.
  • Save you money, if you do it right.
  • Save you stress, since there will always be something to cook for dinner.
    Pantries actually predate rainy-day funds as a way to protect families from the unforeseen, but many people never learned the habit of stocking up – or they’ve been going about it the wrong way, as I did for many years.
    The key to a good pantry is actually pretty simple: You need to store food you actually eat…
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That is one thing I really admire about the LDS. They require it of their folks. I’ve been doing this to an extent myself, and it has really helped us recently. 👍
 
I’d say we have a good 2 weeks’ worth of food in our pantry and I like the reassurance. Only problem is that it doesn’t do a bit of good when you get pregnancy cravings…😛 😃 😃 😃
 
WOW ---- that MSN article has tons of links to great tips!!! I’ve already printed off $7.50 in coupons!

Coupon hunting - my new hobby! 😉

I would say that we have at least two weeks of food in the house. But the trick is keeping it at that level and not just eating it down to nothing because you might have a thin week.

~Liza
 
I put in a pantry this summer, in the garage. I also have a large freezer. I LOVE IT. And it saves going out on a cold winter night.:winter:And yes, it is filled with foods we eat, not off-brand Spam and plankton bits.
 
OutinChgoburbs said:
I put in a pantry this summer, in the garage. I also have a large freezer. I LOVE IT. And it saves going out on a cold winter night.:winter:And yes, it is filled with foods we eat, not off-brand Spam and plankton bits.
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Plankton bits? LOL. What do you think, Kevin’s girl? 🍿

I usually keep my pantry fairly well stocked with foods we eat and basic staples. I don’t know if it’s exactly two weeks worth, but it’s probably close to that or more. I never thought about that as a form of “financial investing”, as the article describes it but it just always made good sense to me. I can’t always get to the store right away when we run out of something.

As winter approaches, I feel like a squirel gathering nuts as I have a strong instinct to store supplies. There are several good buys this week as grocery stores hope to lure shoppers with “loss leaders” to buy all the expensive holiday goodies from their stores. I usually stock up as items go on sale.

Lizanne, thanks for noting the additional articles with more good tips linked from this article. I hadn’t read those until you mentioned them.
 
gardenswithkids said:
As winter approaches, I feel like a squirel gathering nuts as I have a strong instinct to store supplies. There are several good buys this week as grocery stores hope to lure shoppers with “loss leaders” to buy all the expensive holiday goodies from their stores. I usually stock up as items go on sale.
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Oh yes - I do that as well. And this is typically the best time of year to buy butter and freeze it. I stock up for a few month’s worth (we don’t eat a ton of it anyway) - butter freezes very well.
Lizanne, thanks for noting the additional articles with more good tips linked from this article. I hadn’t read those until you mentioned them.
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You are welcome! 😃 I almost didn’t see them myself, but then I spent at least a good hour reading through a bunch of them!! 👍

~Liza
 
I am stocked up for a couple months. I know of LDS families who do not rotate their stock and EWWW.
 
I would say we have a good months worth of food between the pantry and freezer. Try no to get too far ahead in the freezer department though as our power goes out from time to time during the winter…
 
Alexandra said:
I would say we have a good months worth of food between the pantry and freezer. Try no to get too far ahead in the freezer department though as our power goes out from time to time during the winter…
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Well, depending where you live, you could just stick the frozen food in a snowbank until the power comes back. 😃
 
I just can’t do it, everyone!

I buy just enough food for one week, and by the end of the week, it’s gone and the cupboard/pantry/frig is bare. I’ve been trying to buy for two weeks, but I don’t use it. Just having so much food intimidates me so I can’t even open the cupboard.

People have actually asked us if we are doing OK! I guess we look like Mother Hubbard at our house!

I hate having “extras” of anything. I only own two pairs of shoes, only 1 package of toilet paper at a time, etc.

I think this has something to do with the fact that my parents were (still are) hoarders who used to stock up, and then it would all go to waste. My husband’s parents are really bad hoarders (Peter Walsh would find them a challenge) who never throw ANYTHING away without a fight and tears and then they sneak out and retrieve it and hide it somewhere else in their house.

So I think in mental self-defense, I’ve become an “anti-hoarder” who throws things out constantly.

I guess when the disaster strikes, I’ll die first. Oh, well.

We go out to eat almost every day anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.
 
Cat - I can see why you would recoil from having extra stuff around when you are surrounded by excess like that. But it really is not a good idea to eat yourself down to nothing every week. If something did happen you could really be in a very scary situation.

Do you have somewhere in the house that you could make a pantry area that you would not have to look at all the time? Perhaps the basement, or maybe the back of a closet even? Maybe if it’s “out of sight” it will be “out of mind” as well??

I would just hate for your family to be in a difficult situation due to, gosh just about anything, illness, natural disaster, economy, death - you just never know. 😦 It’s not paranoia, it’s just being practical and prepared. There is a difference between excessive and being responsible. 🙂

~Liza
 
Cat said:
I just can’t do it, everyone!
…I think this has something to do with the fact that my parents were (still are) hoarders who used to stock up, and then it would all go to waste. My husband’s parents are really bad hoarders …So I think in mental self-defense, I’ve become an “anti-hoarder” who throws things out constantly…

I guess when the disaster strikes, I’ll die first. Oh, well.

We go out to eat almost every day anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.
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Cat, I know from your other posts that you love winter. You might be the kind who would snowshoe through a storm to go out to dinner while the rest of us hybernate.:snowing:

One of the points that this article made was that having supplies on hand could save you stress and money. Keeping food around that your family can eat shouldn’t cause stress. It can save money and stress if people just go out because they have nothing to eat at home. However, if you enjoy eating out often and you can afford it, that’s your family’s choice on how you spend your money.

This article came from a financial website. (I thought about posting it in “faith and finances” but I figured it also fit under Family Life and more people would probably see it here.) While it discussed disasters and emergencies, (which do strike different from time to time) stocking up the pantry was also suggested as a way to help families prepare for financial difficulty, such as job loss. There are other ways to “save for a rainy day” beyond stocking the cupboards, but keeping food on hand is generally an easy and painless way to be prepared. The article made the point that hoarding stuff that until it goes bad and later gets thrown away is a waste of money.
Not “food you might resort to in a dire emergency” or “food some leftover Y2K calculator says you should stock.” Food you actually eat, right now.
Because otherwise your pantry becomes a food mausoleum, another well-intentioned idea that doesn’t quite work, costs you a pile of money and ultimately gets abandoned when you get sick of looking at all the dusty bags of soy flour.
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The author suggested buying stuff you actually will eat and rotating stock so it doesn’t go bad. Please note that I was NOT suggesting that anyone do what you wrote your parents and in-laws do.
 
Ha! I laughed when I read the bit about ramen noodles in the article because that is so me. DH and I had a period in our lives where we could only afford to eat 2 packs of ramen noodles per day per person for a few months and I will never ever touch them again. And yet we still have some in the cupboard, just in case 😛
I do have some extra food in my cupboard but it’s mostly of the plankton bits and spam variety (black beans? red river cereal? canned beets? whhhyyy?) This article has some good tips!
 
It’s my feeling that most American households have all kinds of food in their house, but they aren’t used to thinking of it as “food.” Flour, sugar, and water?–you can make little fried cakes–yucky for everyday, but if you are starving, pretty darn tasty! Corn meal?–make mush. Old piece of beef in the freezer–slice it thin and stir fry it with that soft carrot.

If anything happened on a drastic scale (terrorist invation, tornado, etc.) we would forage for food. We live one block away from “Restaurant Row” in our city, and surely there would be some cases of beans floating around. Now if only we could find our can opener in the rubble!

OR we would live on stored fat, and both of us have PLENTY of that!
 
we’re getting there.
**danged kids keep eating it all though - they eat to capacity you know. whatever you buy - they eat. buy more- they eat more!😛 😃 **
I already have a once a month non-grocery list
Now I’m finally getting a very rough food list
for now, it’s just stuff that we always eat, thus should always have on hand. I call it our Staples Plus list
this way when I see a sale, I can stock up or buy in bulk. For example if buying canned green beans - I have a note on the list that it takes 5 cans for every meal. So I know that I’m not really stocking up if I only by 10 cans because that’s just 2 meals worth.
in addition to staple items like the 25lb bag of rice from Sams (which is WAY better and cheaper than the Minute Rice!) , black beans, flour, oatmeal…
it also lists green beans, potatos, corn, onion, fruit
if these other produce items go on sale, I buy as much as I can afford,
when I buy them fresh (not frozen bags or canned) I leave what I think I’ll use in the frig, and slice the rest up into freezer bags and put in the freezer. This is also great because when I need say bell peppers, it really cuts meal prep time - all I have to do is crack what I need out of the bag, run them under warm water for a minute and use them just like I would freshly cut!
learn to substitute and keep that stuff on hand too. dried minced onion and garlic for example. we HATE bland food. So I buy those big containers of spices from Sams as I need them.
We are slowly getting better. It’s not easy because our finances are not getting better. But with the exception of milk and bread, we’re very close to buying groceries only every 2 weeks. Or course, by the end of the 2 weeks, the pantry is empty. But we hope to get better and better.
And it is saving us money.
If nothing else, it’s saving us gas making grocery runs.
 
I happen to catch “17 Kids and Counting” and it showed the Duggars making an Aldi run at the beginning of the month. Not my fav show(I was waiting for something else to come on), but I was really pleased to see the Aldi run, and how they stock up.
 
Rob_s_Wife said:
we’re getting there.
danged kids keep eating it all though - they eat to capacity you know. whatever you buy - they eat. buy more- they eat more!😛 😃 …****.
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LOL You must buy good stuff.

It’s hard keeping any stock of chocolate around my house. I’ll think I have the makings for smores or chocolate chip cookies and discover someone raided the supplies. :ehh: And it wasn’t me.

Basic staples like flour, spices, cooking oil etc. they usually leave alone as it’s not ready to eat. (One of my toddlers used to climb up the counter to get into the sugar bowl, but most of our basic staples we keep behind supposedly child proof cabinet locks.)
 
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