The $21 Challenge By Fiona Lippey

Fiona Lippey ´ 2 Read

Feed a family for a week on $21? You must be kidding!

Not at all! It really is possible. Over the last 3 years thousands of families in Australia have already achieved 'the impossible',

How does it work? Simple - this week you are only allowed to spend $21 on food. You will have to learn how to stretch the food you already have in your cupboard, pantry, garden and freezer to stay within your $21 budget.

Can you do it? Absolutely! We have already done all the hard work for you. All the information and inspiration you need to succeed is in this book. The $21 Challenge

A very good inspiring book on how to live on a budget. I spend between 450-500 a fortnight on groceries for a family of five and have found it very hard to budget. The $21 challenge book has helped me save alot and the suggested ideas and recipes are a great source of information which has helped me keep my fortnightly grocery list down. At first you do a $21 challenge and from there you just follow tips from the book. I have done the $21 challence a few times now and it has been worthwhile. This book has been a very good investment for the small cost of the book. I use it often and I recommended it to anyone who would like ideas on how to save or how to use up stuff in your kitchen cupboards. There is a website you can use also which has alot of usefull infomation which is called simplesavings.com.au. Thank you Fiona lippery and Jackie Gower for helpng me save money. Highly recommended. The Challenge We spend about $300 a week on groceries and the figure seems to be growing along with the kids. So $21 looks like a steep challenge. Just one week’s success though, will have a $280 value. Do it once a month, and the annual savings would be $3,300. That’s no small amount, especially when the book retails for around $17. But the short term savings are only a small part of the picture of this clever book. The bigger benefit is the way The $21 Challenge will change your perspective and habits in a way that can be far more rewarding than three grand in the pocket each year. Because the real key to this book is the way it will show you how much you already have, whether that be food, clothing, toys, gadgets, and how to use, and how to use planning and stock takes to guide purchasing (rather than being guided by hunger, advertisements, desire). The end result could be life-changing.

The premise of the book is simple. Commit to taking the challenge – just once to begin with. Then follow through by starting with a stocktake. This is a real eye-opener, as most people, and my family is no exception, have significant amounts of food already in the cupboards, fridge and freezer, much of it forgotten (and some of it going out of date before it gets used). Then use this food as a guide to menu planning. If you’ve never done a menu plan before, then this is another dramatic benefit of the book. Lippey and Gower provide menu planners and lots of examples on the best way of doing this. They even provide free templates on the website. The final step is a very targeted shopping list that takes your meal plan and allows you to spend $21 picking the few key items you need to make it through the week. It’s that easy. Well, it’s easy once you get used to it anyway.

In addition to a guide to the system, and lots of templates (including Fiona’s amazing life planner – if this doesn’t get you organised, nothing will), the book provides a lot of anecdotes, tips, and above all, superb and very economical recipes for family friendly and healthy eating. That’s the thing I like best about this book – that it has been written in a simple, entertaining and easy to follow manner by parents. Lippey and Gower not only already know what’s in your pantry (they got mine perfectly – right down to the unused couscous and tahini jar) but they know what your children will eat and all about family dynamics and about how busy you are and how much spare time you have (none…).

It’s worth the price of the book for the incredible recipes alone. Some of the recipes that I’ve added to my repertoire almost immediately include “Grandma’s marvellous muffins”, “Homemade sausage rolls”, “gourmet pies” (these freeze really nicely for lunchboxes), “Impossible Pie”. “Naomi’s Tuna Pie” (having this for the second time tonight by request, and it’s not a $21 week!), McMummy’s (brilliant!), and “Budget ‘bix slice”. Chapter 6 is devoted to tell you how to use all those nice ingredients you’d forgotten you had and weren’t sure how to use, from that lovely jar of marinated artichokes, to the bag of desiccated coconut that has been on the top of your cupboard for a year. Even if you never take on the $21 challenge, this book will minimise the amount of food that you end up throwing out, and that has to be good. The final chapter provides ingredient substitutions, so you can still cook your favourite meals without having to run out to the shops.

All in all, The $21 Challenge is a wonderful, fun, and inspiring book that, like the simplesavings.com.au website, will help you make the most of what you’ve already got. In the financially stretched, emotionally stressed world of the 21st Century, what could be be more topical or worthwhile. Ultimately, at its most basic level, this is a book that can, and if you apply it, most certainly will, save you money, it’s more than that. It’s a simplified and hands-on primer on taking control of your life and deciding how you’ll spend your money and time, rather than allowing yourself to be manipulated by those who stand to benefit from consumerism. It isn’t so much about making do with less, as about how best to use what you’ve got and driving your spending by a well thought through process of planned expenditure. Don’t expect any new age claptrap here though. Instead, Lippey and Gower have created a very practical, fun, cartoon rich book that will appeal to just about anyone and will add value to any household whether it’s used as an occasional tool to save up for something or as the start to a major life-change. Either way, it’s $17 very well spent. The Challenge The purpose of this book is to show everyone how to save money, whilst still eating well and healthily.

Be prepared to do some work at the beginning and everything falls into place. You will need to list everything in your freezer, everything in your pantry and everything in your fridge. You then meal plan for the week around your existing ingredients. Sounds simple and it is, but still very time consuming in the beginning.

This system of the $21 Challenge is not meant for every week, unless you are really on hard times, but for say once a month or so. You would then not waste anything because the idea is that you use up everything left over.

There are plenty of ideas and recipes to use up the strange things left in the back of the cupboard, or lurking in the bottom of the freezer.

All in all this is a very practical book, with lots of useful ideas, but still human nature tends towards sloth.

The Challenge Although I only gave this book three stars, it is a book that has stuck with me.

The book's main shortcoming is that it doesn't really need to be a BOOK. It felt like the authors stretched a pamphlet or a website into book length because someone gave them an advance to do so, or said, Hey, you guys should write a book about this! Whole chapters could have been cut, like the one about how to deal with people who were naysayers about the $21 challenge. The font size was big with a lot of white space as well, adding to the feeling that the idea was really stretched to make it book-length.

With all that said, the idea IS a good one -- basically, to challenge yourself to only spend $21 on groceries in a given week to force you out of your buying/consuming habits and get you to really LOOK at what you already own. The idea is to cure you of ingredient blindness so that when you go grocery shopping, you are only picking up a few items to complete meals you can make with what you already have, rather than constructing new meals every single week. Although I had some awareness of this before reading the book, this helped keep it top-of-mind at a time in my life when we need to keep a much tighter rein on our finances. Hardly any of our food goes to waste now, and this book helped get me into the right mindset for that.

The recipes at the end for using up common pantry items are helpful, too. The Challenge I always like to read these budgeting books and hope something sticks. This one challenges you to spend only $21 on your weekly groceries (not all the time, just once when you're really tight on money.) The idea is that by mastering this challenge you will learn some shortcuts to help stretch your budget. The book has you inventory your pantry and fridge and also gives lots of recipe ideas for using up what you've got, and making less expensive entrees.

Since this was written by Australians there are some unique recipes, which was my favorite thing about it. I tried and cannot find a way to only spend $21--maybe in summer if I had some garden produce. But the book did encourage me to make use of everything and be more frugal about my grocery shopping. The Challenge

Some parts were basic knowledge in my opinion but I really enjoyed the substituting ingredients section and the writing style was quite cute and easy to read. The Challenge the idea behind $21 challenge is simple: run lean pantry and plan meals ahead. This should save you some buck in theory. I have implemented some ideas and our menu has more variety, also halved the pantry stock. The Challenge Love, Love, LOVE this book! This is my new family Bible for the kitchen - and in life in general. Thanks Fiona and Jackie for helping me see things clearer : ) The Challenge Some good points, not a compelling read but a useful and motivating handbook. The Challenge