Live below the line is a very interesting charitable challenge in which you have only £5 to buy all your food for 5 days in acknowledgement of the sobering reality that this is normal budgeting for much of the world.
We'd done very well with the challenge two years ago, overspent a little last year & were a bit late getting started this month.
And we did make life harder for ourselves this year, with Tim & I each having £5 to spend instead of pooling our resources (except for sharing a bag of rice & tub of drinking chocolate) (and I actually overspent by 5p as we decided I could spend £1 instead of 95p in order to get free range eggs).
He focused on chili (every day's evening meal!) while eggs, sausages, sweet and sour sauce and a 7p bag of batter mix were my main items.
One of my main conclusions was that it's much cheaper to buy things like biscuits and noodles than fruit or veg - all I managed to afford was a can of corn.
I normally buy many items in bulk but taking advantage of these savings is impossible without the cash in your purse. Immediately after finishing the exercise I bought 4kg of onions for just £1.20. This more than anything brought home to me that the best value purchases may often be beyond the reach of those who need them most.
(This is the first thing I've written and published from my new smartphone - the Blogger app has proved very easy to use.)
