So I promised yesterday to explain the correlation between my savings category in YNAB and my food storage – and it isn’t that it takes all your savings to stock your stash of food. That would be bad.
When we talk about food storage, there are two kinds – short-term and long-term. Many people start with short-term. It makes sense. You pick up a couple of extra cans of food each time you go to the store, right?
Having a couple of extra cans of beans or tomato sauce on hand might help if you wanted to make chili and you forgot to pick up tomato sauce that week. But if you have a reason to dip into your food storage (maybe your car needed a new alternator and you could either stay home from work for a week or you could pay for it out of your grocery money) and all you have are a flat of tomato sauce cans and a flat of cans of mandarin oranges. Good luck coming up with meals made with that combination!
Food storage works the same way as your savings account. Just like you focus on your general emergency savings first, the best thing to do is to focus your long-term storage first.
You don’t have to finish it before you start picking up any short-term food storage, but you are going to get the biggest financial bang for your buck by purchasing bulk items FIRST. Long-term food storage gives you the biggest bang for your buck hands down!
I can hear some of you muttering to yourselves right now, “Long-term food storage. Fine, what do I buy? How much is it going to cost, and where do I find it? What do I do with it once I get it?”
Ha! Well, I’m not going to tell you. . . Well, not today. We’ll get to some of that in the next post.
