Adventures in Frugality: Once a Month Shopping

A friend recently told me that, even though she is once-a-month-cooking, she is still spending hundreds of dollars a month at the grocery store. This caused me to do some investigation into the grocery spending in the Langford home.

I was hit in the face with several harsh pieces of reality:

1. My pantry is full of items that are pieces and parts of recipes that were purchased due to poor planning.



2. In reviewing my receipts I noticed that every trip to a store included some sort of impulse purchase.


(We save all of our reciepts in a basket to be reviewed and sorted at the end of the month. Of course, this sometimes piles up and we have a couple of months at a time.)

3. According to Steve and Annette Economides in their book America’s Cheapest Family, 6 of 10 grocery store purchases are unplanned.




4. In the last two weeks, I have darkened the doorway of a grocery store or department store 11 times! That is more than every other day!!

With all of these facts staring me in the face, I decided to take action! After tossing the idea around for a couple of days, I presented it to my husband. I proposed that we challenge ourselves to shop only one day for an entire month. It sounded much more reasonable in my mind than it did when I said it out loud. Now it sounded absolutely crazy but, having verbalized to my husband my preplanned list of pros and cons, I felt in some way committed to the idea.
After talking over some ins and outs for a few minutes we decided to jump off the deep end and give it a try.

For the month of August, we will be blogging all of our prep efforts, plans and lists and countdown to our big shopping day on September 3rd. For the month of September we will be blogging all of the daily issues that pop up, adjustments that need to be made, difficulties and successes as we move toward our next allowed shopping day of October 1st. Our goal is to not set foot in another grocery or department store after that date until the October 1st date. (Even now it sounds insane!)

We will be posting our list of detailed guidelines as we develop them. The ultimate goal of course, is to save money by avoiding the stores, sticking to our budget, planning our meals and eliminating restaurants all together for a month.
You are welcome to jump in on this challenge with us and link up your blog to our regular posts or just read along as we muddle our way through this latest and greatest adventure in frugality!

Frugality with a purpose...

I have always been a frugal kind of gal. I have been called everything from frugalista to tightwad. I prefer frugalista, of course :)

My penny pinching ways have always been for the benefit of my family. I am of the opinion that if my husband brings in the money, it’s my job to stretch it as far as it can possibly go. One of my favorite ways of accomplishing this has been to make my own laundry detergent and fabric softener. This saves me about $25-30 per month.

Another way we stretch our dollar is to once-a-month cook (OAMC). I get together with some of my favorite friends and cook about 200 meals in about 5 hours. We buy all of the ingredients in bulk so, our savings are significant. I then take about 40 meals home and freeze them and just pull them out daily. If we made dinner at home every night, our meals would cost around $10. If we ate out a meal for our family would be no less than $30. If I estimated that we would eat out twice a week and cook at home the other five days, that would cost $110 per week or $440 per month. Our average OAMC meal cost $4-5 and sometimes less. That costs only $35 per week or $140 per month. That gives me a savings of $300 per month. Plus my family is eating healthier food and we are around our table for precious family time.

Here is where it gets good!! With my $360 per month saved I can feed 14 orphans every month or one orphaned child for 8 years!! I could also save that money and once a year have $4320 for a mission trip. Sounds like a good deal to me!!

John 14:18

It is no secret that we Langford’s have a special place in our hearts for orphans and adoption. However, the words of David Nasser at the National Worship Leader’s Conference in Kansas a couple of years ago really changed my whole perspective. What he said made me catch my breath and then weep. He said, “There are 150 million orphans in the world. However, if only 8% of the church would adopt, there would be no more need for orphanages.” Wow! That is not 8% of the world but 8% of God’s people who are instructed to minister to the widows and orphans.

James 1:27
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

Do we not want to offer up to our Father what is pure and undefiled?

Beautiful Brokeness

Saturday night, I was sitting in my living room which was unusually crowded with people. All around the room, sitting in pulled in kitchen chairs, couches, piano benches and the floor and standing in open doorways were the members of the faith family that is our small group. We were all listening intently as our new friend, Kristy O’Leary, shared with us her family’s vision for the plight of the orphans in Ghana, Africa. I watched faces and reactions, as I typically do, and saw hurt, heartache and brokenness. We were weeping and wrapping our hearts around those too far for our arms to reach. When all questions were answered and all concerns voiced, we stood together; hands and hearts joined in prayer. Seconds before the amen was whispered, my head still bowed, I opened my eyes. A tiny flash caught my vision, almost like a falling star until it splashed on the floor. There were more; small wet circles where droplets had landed before the feet of many around the circle. An instant later, feet shuffled and small puddles were wiped away. I cherish that vision. My faith family, sweetly broken for orphaned children a world away.

I wish I had thought to take a picture of us that night :)

Forget the Frock Easter Challenge

For Easter, our bible study group and 60 other members of our church family chose to feed orphans for Easter instead of buying new clothes.


Almost the whole gang


Our Family (minus Joshua)


The Murphys


The Rhodes


The Johnsons

Stones Rolled Away

Today, Easter Sunday, as I rejoiced over my risen savior, I also found myself thinking about those women who went early to the tomb of Jesus. I was sitting in our sunrise service this morning when I began to wonder how those women thought they would move the stone from the entrance of the tomb. How would they convince the soldiers to let them try to move the stone? Surely they knew that they would face these obstacles yet, they rose early in the morning and set out for the tomb to properly anoint the body of their Lord.

How different the Easter story would be if those women, when considering the obstacles, would have thought the task before them impossible and not even tried. Christ would still be risen, the world would still never be the same, but those women would have missed the blessing of witnessing the empty tomb. Mary would not have been the first to see the risen Lord. She would not have heard him call her name.

I began to wonder how many blessings we miss because we look down the road God is calling us to walk and only see the impossibility of the obstacles in our path.

What if we simply began to move forward in faith, knowing that our mighty God who is more than able, will make a way?

Would we build houses for orphans, would we feed the hungry, clothe the poverty stricken, begin a revival? Would we witness, first hand, God doing the impossible?

Bunnies, T-Shirts and Feeding Orphans

Our God truly works in amazing and sometimes, unexpected ways! He can choose to use any circumstance or situation for his ultimate glory. Isn’t it just like God to use the most benign occurrences to do something awesome! This is exactly what happened when we met the O’Learys.

Over a year ago, I found myself riding with my husband and two of our children out to what seemed like the middle of nowhere, to pick up some free rabbits and a hutch that had been advertised on our local homeschool loop. The middle of nowhere turned out to be somewhere near Loudon, TN, about an hour from our house. At the top of a long driveway that seemed to go straight up, we met some very friendly dogs, a couple of cuddly bunnies and the O’Learys. We stayed longer than anticipated enjoying the easy conversation that typically comes when God’s people meet. After loading the rabbits and hutch in our truck we headed home. I remember my husband saying what nice, down to earth people were and what a shame that they lived so far away. We would most likely not see them again.

A few months later on a very cold morning, I was wandering around in a huge yard sale that was happening about 20 minutes from my house. I was paying for an armload of homeschool books when one of the women working there asked if I had picked up some bunnies and a hutch a few months back. It took a few minutes for Kristie O’Leary and I to catch up on the bunny business and then she began to tell me of her families plan to adopt from Ghana. Her story grabbed my heart so much that I found myself reading her blog for about an hour that evening. I reminded my husband about the family and shared the news with him of their pending adoption. I think that was the first time God planted the seed of the possibility of international adoption for our family. I bumped into Kristie again at another yard sale. Again, she recognized me and asked if I had picked up some bunnies. I do so wish that I were better at remembering names and faces.

Recently, we were walking through the Knoxville Zoo and instead of watching the animals, I found myself admiring a family. It was so obvious that this family was one of those precious ones of God’s amazing design; one where he had mixed children born of mother’s body with those born of her heart. A beautiful little girl had just smiled at me as she held her mother’s hand when I heard a voice that seemed familiar say, “Didn’t you come pick up some bunnies?” I nearly cried when I realized I was face to face with the children we had been reading about a few months back.

As we traveled home from the zoo that day I began to feel and share with my husband that these chance meetings were not just coincidence but, divine appointment. That evening we revisited the “From God the Ghana” blog and the new Feeding the Orphans website. We were amazed at what God was doing with this family.
I found Kristie on facebook and just a couple of weeks later, I found myself reading a post of how a mother was moved to purchase Love Orphans t-shirts with the money she would have spent on her family’s Easter clothes. My husband, who had been reading over my shoulder said, “Look’s like it’s t-shirts for us this year!” After talking to our children about the Easter shirt challenge and seeing how excited they were to be able to feed hungry children, God led us to share the challenge with our church youth group and then with our entire church body. We were amazed at the response we got from our church body.

Now here we are, two days before Easter. Two bunnies, a couple of yard sales and 74 t-shirts later, there are lots of orphaned children being fed in Ghana, Africa because of the response of just a few of God’s people in Knoxville, TN.

Through this process, I have learned to look for God in every instant and in every circumstance of every day. When we are willing beyond our abilities, our God is able beyond our limitations.