As a homesteader, we have this romantic notion of sustaining ourselves completely from our homestead. We see a future where we don’t need to purchase food and other items in order to maintain the freedom we want at home. While that is a noble dream, it is almost unreachable for most of us. Many of us don’t even know where to begin.

When we were having our family discussions of what do we want to do on the homestead for 2018, we always kept coming back to the same topic – How do we raise more of our own food and not buy as much at the grocery store? It may sound simple like, “grow more – spend less” but when you really think about it, where do you need to start?

We think in order to set a goal to move toward in 2018 you have to know from where you are starting. Kelly and I want to invite you all to join us as we kick off our 2018 Homestead Food Spending Challenge. The challenge includes logging grocery and other food purchases throughout the year on a spreadsheet that we have created. The process of recording this info will help us not only tally how much we spend each month but it will also show us what we spend the most money buying. With that information, we can have a more educated attempt to replace the purchased food with something we have raised or bartered.

If you want to try to challenge out with us, simply download the spreadsheet below and start entering your grocery receipts from this month and on. Each month, we will have a video and blog update discussing the trends we are seeing and how we are going to make adjustments. The spreadsheets are in multiple formats for those that use different software.

Download the Excel Version

Download the Open Office Version

Download the Printable Version

If you don’t have any spreadsheet software or don’t want to install any, use your Google account to open either the Excel or Open Office versions by importing them into Google Sheets. It is free and is entirely web based. Just go to google.com/sheets.

Watch Episode 59 that goes live at 4:30pm on January 1st, 2018 for more details of this exciting challenge.