Can we talk about money for a second?
The budget is the scariest topic in the house. Aren’t we all trying to save every dollar, trying to figure out how to make more and use less? Honestly, it’s one of the reasons I started a suburban homestead.
I knew there had to be a better way to provide nutritious food for my family without spending more money on groceries. It’s a little crazy that highly processed food, which goes through multiple steps of preservation to make it as shelf-stable as possible, is cheaper than whole food that grows on trees.
If only we planted more trees 🙂
For us, the turning point was something as simple as flour.
Our journey to expanding the grocery budget started with making bread. Not the fancy kind, I mean the everyday stuff. The sandwich loaves, the biscuits, the pizza dough, the tortillas, the muffins. All those ready-made bread products that your family devours, and you need to buy every week.
I finally decided I was going to start making them myself. I started with all the bread my kids eat on a regular basis, and honestly, it’s been the best thing I have ever done. Not just for our health, but for our budget.
We stopped buying most pre-made bread products and started buying bulk baking staples instead.
This was our big transition to the homesteading lifestyle. We started with a big bag of flour. A jar of yeast. Baking powder, sugar, oats, salt. All the staple items that you used to find in every family pantry. Surprisingly, I rarely used these items and started this journey literally from scratch.
The Cost Comparison of Baking Supplies
I’m not here to tell you all my supplies come from a farm, or that we don’t shop at the grocery store because we do. I am writing this to say that taking a step back from convenience and putting in the time and effort to make homemade staples will actually help save you your hard-earned money. And help teach your kids about life skills, including how to budget.
We did a lot of bulk staple shopping at Costco when we first started our homestead journey, but honestly, it doesn’t matter where you start your staples shopping because buying a bag of flour, yeast, salt, sugar, and oil is going to be cheaper than buying the premade items every week at the store. Even if one bag of flour lasted you one week, the sugar, yeast, oil, and salt will last even longer.
Which means the next week all your buying is a 25 lb bag of flour, which costs around $10–$12. One standard loaf of bread uses roughly 3 cups of flour, so that single bag covers 25 or more loaves. and covers at least a week’s worth of homemade bread, pancakes, biscuits, pizza crusts, and muffins. Compare that to $4–$6 per loaf at the store, and the savings add up fast. In our house, even making two loaves of bread every week, one bag of flour will last us a month.
A family of four can spend up to about $40 per week on pre-made or ready-to-eat baked goods, like bread, tortillas, cookies, muffins, and frozen waffles/pancakes. Now, picture yourself saving over $20 per week. That’s an extra $100 per month back in your pocket, every month.
The USDA’s 2025 moderate-cost food plan estimates $975–$1,500/month for a family of four. But strategic bulk and homestead shopping can bring that down to $600–$900. Urban areas, particularly on the coasts, tend to run 15–30% higher than the national average.
Guess what area we live in, hahaha.
But by switching to the homestead shopping method and homemade staples, we are averaging about $700 in groceries per month, and that is spread over a variety of items; it’s not just the bulk staples. This is starting to cover, produce, baking supplies, paper products, gardening supplies, livestock supplies, cleaning supplies, and health and beauty.
Let me tell you something that surprises me: Americans spend an average of $1,850 per year on food delivery alone. That’s not even the money spent on food. And I get it, after working 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, plus kids’ sports, household chores, and caring for older or younger family members, we’re exhausted. But that exhaustion is exactly what made this shift feel like more than just a money-saving tip. It changed how we spent our time together.
The Impact on Family Time
The best thing about this lifestyle change is how our family spent more time planning our baking adventures together. My kids enjoy being part of the baking routines and deciding what flavors we are going to make, and how to decorate our favorite cinnamon rolls.
Bonus, I love the life lessons they are getting through this process. They are learning the difference between store-bought items and homemade. They are getting real-world lessons in the cost of store-bought items. This really hit my oldest when I told them that if they wanted the “junk food,” they were gonna have to buy it themselves with their chore money. That changed their thinking quickly, but they also recognized the difference between buying ingredients and making something themselves versus picking up a package at the store.
And it wasn’t just the cost.
“Baking at home is more fun, and it tastes better when we make it, Mom.”
Music to my ears.
Expanding to Produce
Once we had our baking budget under control, we had more flexibility in how we approached the rest of our grocery list. That’s when we started changing how we shopped for produce, and making sure we actually used the whole food.
We started shopping at farm stands and farmers’ markets for fruits and vegetables rather than defaulting to the grocery store. We found we could buy more and pay less. (If you’re looking for a farmers’ market near you, the USDA maintains a searchable directory at ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/farmersmarkets.)
The method was all about timing, being creative with preserving and storing. When we buy produce from the farmers’ market, we are buying produce that is in-season, locally grown food at its peak. We’d buy in bulk and preserve it for the months when it isn’t available or too expensive, locking in the lowest price and the best quality at the same time.
It took time for us to get to a point where we only needed to grocery shop once per month. And because we wanted to expand the life of our produce we got creative with preserving.
When the kids stopped eating fruit whole, we made fruit leather. We explored homemade gummies. We changed how we made juice, starting with orange juice and using every part of the fruit.
The Money Difference
The best example I can give you is strawberries. I recently bought a full flat of 6 baskets for $25, at the farmers’ market. At the grocery store, a single basket runs about $6 in season, and more than $8 when they’re out of season. With that flat, I vacuum-sealed several baskets for winter (hull them first, then freeze flat on a sheet pan before sealing, it makes a big difference in texture), made a batch of strawberry topping for yogurt, and still had enough fresh berries for the kids’ lunch boxes all week. That one $25 purchase did the work of several weeks of grocery store purchases, and saved me about $23.
Where we go from here
Our conversion from convenience shopping to homestead shopping has only just begun. With our grocery budget now in a healthier place, we’re turning our attention to dairy and meat, looking for the best and most direct sources for those staples. Not just to stretch the budget further, but to improve our health and support a more self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle.
Look for more posts on what we are switching to and where we are finding our resources. We’ll be sharing that journey here as we go. In the meantime, we’d love to know: where did your homesteading journey start?
Resources:
- USDA Food Plans & Cost of Food Reports — fns.usda.gov
- LendingTree 2024/2025 Food Delivery Consumer Survey — lendingtree.com
- USDA Farmers Market Directory — ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/farmersmarkets
- King Arthur Baking (beginner bread recipes) — kingarthurbaking.com
Photo Credits:
Original Photos by Suburban Homesteads LLC
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