$2/day in perspective
I’m going to have to update this post later to include links, but I have some time right now to put down my thoughts so I’ll do this as an iPhone post.
I mentioned a couple days before lent that I would be doing a week long challenge from an organization called Mutunga, in which I can only take in $2/day worth of food. The idea is to understand and empathize with the roughly 1/2 (maybe it’s 1/3, I’ll fix that later too) of the worlds population that live on the equivalent of $2 US buying power (they can buy with their daily budgets what we can here for ~$2/day). The extra money we save (based on what we would have spent on a normal day) will be going to Kiva.
I’m blessed enough that my wife is willing to do this with me, I found out yesterday when buying for this that $4/day for two people is much easier to buy for than $2/day for one person. I also have a couple cool baristas at the local coffee shop I frequent that hopped onto the idea as well, perhaps I’ll get us all together to discuss the experience.
Now for the couple caveats that I had to put in place, I’m only going to be able to fully commit for five days instead of seven. I have a two day long seminar for work in which i’m not certain of the level of control I’ll have of food set in front of me. I’m going to attempt to remain faithful during those last couple days, but I’ll have to play it by ear.
Now for the previously mentioned perspective.
The grand total of my purchases yesterday was $36. Since I was only buying for five days our budget was only $20, and $17 of yesterday was a bag of dog food, which really brought things home. I was spending nearly as much on a bag of dog food as I was going to eat for the next five days. Pretty crazy.
The other thing that brought this home was me practically jumping for joy when I saw brown sugar oatmeal on sale, I knew that I could make a pretty good veggie soup for dinner for five nights, but I was worried about breakfast because I have a fairly physical job. But really, who gets excited that oatmeal is on sale?
Already seeing some/habits that could be changed to reduce some of the wasteful spending, I’m actually kind of curious as to how long I’d be able to keep this up for if I can restart after the seminar next week.
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