Live Below The Line: Day 1

I told you last week that I would be challenging myself to eat for $1.50/day or less this week as part of the Live Below The Line Campaign.   The point is to raise awareness (and funds obviously, but I'm not asking that from anyone.  There is info in that link if you'd like to learn more) that there are many, many people in the world living in extreme poverty who have $1.50/day or less to feed themselves with.

I have taken this to mean $1.50 per person and not $1.50 per family (which I cannot even imagine is possible!) so I have done some calculations to determine the cost of all the food that I have eaten today.

Here's what I had:

Breakfast:  1 slice Freezer Banana Bread =  $0.16
                 1 cup Silk Dark Chocolate Almond Milk =$0.16  (calculated based on price paid after coupons)

Total =   $0.38 for breakfast

Lunch:   2 Tuna wraps with pear chunks = $0.58 total for both  (including cost of 2 tortillas--bought at reduced prices, mayo bought with coupon, tuna bought on sale, and 1/2 a pear)

Drank Water


Dinner:  Red Beans & Rice =  $0.35   (I got this from the freezer, so I combined the total price of all the ingredients--beans & sausage + rice for 6 meals, divided the total by 6 meals, and then divided that by 5 since we all eat off of the meal and my husband has a leftover portion for lunch the next day)

Cornbread = $0.26 for 2 servings  The recipe actually made nearly twice as many servings as it said, so this portion ended up only costing $0.15

Drank Water

Total:  $0.61  $0.50



Total For Day:  $1.57    $1.46!   I made it after all! =)


Sooooo close!  And I must admit that I also had 2 cups of coffee, which the container didn't even have any serving information so I wouldn't even know how to calculate that!  (And I'm also quite likely to have a late night snack LOL)

I don't really consider this a failure, because I think the point is THIS IS NOT EASY!

Honestly, I didn't even try to pick super inexpensive items to begin with for this challenge.  These are normal meals that we eat at least twice a month, usually more like once a week.  I did, however, try to make sure they were well balanced, and making sure we were having some fruits/veggies at each meal.   I would not always add the pear into the tuna salad, but today it sounded good! =)

I think that in order to stay below the $1.50/day, I would have to sacrifice some nutritional content for sure, or else not really filled myself up!  Today I most definitely did NOT go hungry!

Tomorrow, I plan to make a large pot of chicken soup.  I have no idea how much that is going to end up costing per serving, but I know it's a very inexpensive dish to make, so we will see if I can stay below the line!

Are you taking this challenge with me?   If you blogged about it, link up below.  If not, leave a comment below!