Some Things Are Worth Beans & Rice — CampFIRE Homesteading

I’ve been repeating this phrase a lot lately: some things are worth beans and rice. What I mean by this, is that some things are worth prioritizing over excessive spending. No, I do not want to only eat beans and rice. Yes, some people have to eat a ‘beans and rice’ diet because of their very limited means. We have accumulated means to afford more than beans and rice and enjoy quality home-cooked meals every day.

What the phrase means

I use this phrase as a reminder that things could always be worse, and that we are fortunate to have what we have. We have made smart choices, and try to continue this trend on a daily basis as we pursue financial independence. It’s a reminder we could always “tighten our belts” and do more, but that we have the power to make our own choices, based on our priorities.

To be honest, I don’t budget any more like I did when getting out of debt. I stalk my Mint page to make sure I don’t have fraudulent transactions, but otherwise I just monitor spending. I know, I know, this doesn’t sound very FIREy. True! As we transition to doing more homesteading, we’re watching our transactions to get a more realistic sense of what our annual expenses are/will be.

I really started to re-evaluate my spending choices when I started considering everything in terms of annual expenses. My Audible membership is only $16 a month. But that’s a whopping $192 a year! It’s a luxury expense I continue to support because of how often I listen to/use the subscription. Are you ready for this whopper? I’ve been a member since 2009. Yep. I’ve spent over two thousand dollars on audiobooks. This makes me cringe, but I continue to get value out of this, so I continue to foot the bill.

Here, I might use the phrase, “some things are worth beans and rice” as a way of saying that I might chose to minimize my spending in an area in order to keep my Audible luxury. It’s a way to remind myself that I am in the driver seat of my spending. I don’t have to keep the subscription, it’s a choice each month to keep it. But the reality is that if we’re eating beans and rice, we’re probably not listening to audible while doing so!

What is worth ‘beans and rice?’

This is something only you can answer! I’m willing to give up my good 9-5 cubicle job in order to homestead. I’m willing to trade the wages associated with those hours in order to spend the time on our homestead, growing our operations. I’m willing to spend the energy prototyping improvements or new ventures instead of typing out reports. I’m willing to do this because our nest egg is large enough to support this, and we have no debt. I’m not willing to do this yet/right now because we don’t have all of our systems in place, and are working on ways to build passive income streams.

As we plan out this life transition (from 9-5 office gigs to full-time homesteading), we’re regularly asking ourselves, “how bad do we want it?” Saying that some things are worth beans and rice is a way of communicating that we want whatever-it-is bad enough to sacrifice a lifestyle and ‘endure’ something that ‘feels like scraping by’ in order to achieve the goal.

Only you can decide what might be worth beans and rice. The important point I want to drive home here: we make these prioritization choices every time we spend time or money doing something. The opportunity cost of “spending” time or money highlights that once it’s gone, it’s gone—you no longer have the opportunity to use the spent resources for anything else. Whether we are consciously thinking about it or not, we are comparatively spending a resource (time or money) in order to procure something else. We are deciding that this-thing-we’re-about-to-spend-money-on is more important to procure than the-things-we’re-not-spending-money-on. That’s a bit of an over simplification, but it’s a great way to self-evaluate spending.

A way I check my own spending with this in mind is letting things languish in the online shopping cart. For a grocery store pickup, I fill that sucker with everything on sale or that looks good, or that I’ve wanted to grab to try a new recipe. But when I go and actually schedule the pickup and to pay for the cart, I get delete-happy and purge that sucker of things that we don’t actually need. I get on a roll, and making one good choice fuels another.

Choosing beans and rice

I want to point out, again, the difference that we are making these choices. Right now, if we have beans and rice for lunch, it’s our choice. We have stable jobs and can afford more if we so choose. This isn’t true for everyone.

Our choosing to self-restrict our spending rather than to ‘keep up with Joneses’ enables us to do more for friends, family, and organizations we support. Lifestyle inflation can act like a hidden tax if you’re not careful! We really believe that high tides lift all boats, and are happy to share our blessings with others as we’re able. By clearly prioritizing our spending, we have more freedom and flexibility to do this.

There’s great freedom in directing your spending, rather than spending on auto-pilot. By choosing what is worth beans and rice, it will prevent us from being forced into a situation where we’re dependent on beans and rice. It’s a bit of a defensive framing for us to preserve our freedom of choice!

So how much would “beans and rice” be for a year?

All this talk about priorities… but what would it look like financially to commit to ‘beans and rice?’

First the beans. Kroger’s regular price for a can of beans at our local store are $.89 a can. Refried beans are $1. Fancy Bush’s baked beans are $1.25 a can. Let’s assume you don’t want the exact same can, and will mix it up, with fancy beans, refried beans, and a rotation of kidney, pinto, black, and chili beans. Assuming you eat half can of beans in the morning, and another half in the evening, let’s start with $1.25/day to plan for boujee beans. Livin’ it up!

This YouTuber did the food math, that if you eat a cup of cooked rice as a serving/meal (or half a cup of dried rice), then there are about 5 servings in a pound of rice. For a year, you’d need 73 pounds of rice. Another search result said to “prep,” that you’ll need 400 pounds of rice per person, per year to get your year’s worth of calories. Since we’re mixing it up with beans and not eating for survival situation calories, I’ll round up to 100 pounds of rice, just to account for the bit of difference. 5lb of long grain rice are only $2.49 for Kroger brand, but 10lb of basmati rice are $15.99. If I’m eating rice for year, I’m definitely going with the boujee basmati rice.

Woah! My first thought… $600 for beans and rice for a year… is $600! That’s a lot! Even the generic option of $375 seems high. In Less is More, we explored the Bureau of Labor and Statistics assessment that a midwestern family of four spends around $7,500 a year on food (both store shopping and eating out). We also mentioned that the national poverty level for the lower 48 states is $26,200.

While $600 is only 8% of the annual average food spending… $2,400 for four eating only beans and rice is 32% of the annual food costs. While one person might be able to make this choice, I can’t imagine a family actually doing this. Seems very extreme to save 68% on your food costs for the year. If my folks had tried this with my sister and I growing up, everyone would have rioted and it would have lasted a couple weeks at best, not a year!

What’s very humbling, is that the $2,400 for beans and rice is about 10% of the poverty line spending. To make such a sacrifice, of actually eating only beans and rice for a year…

I’m glad I did this food math

This drives home what living on beans and rice costs. Not health wise… not emotionally… which are clear additional costs of living on beans and rice… but the math doesn’t really add up to the savings I had figured it would be!

When I say some things are worth beans and rice, my Love says, …with rabbit, and eggs, and garden veg. Thank goodness he’s right. We have lots more on our homestead we could eat than just beans and rice. If we did ‘beans and rice,’ it would just be lunches. I know I couldn’t do it long-term, for every meal. We’d incorporate leftovers, sauces, extras from the garden, etc. to mix it up, too. We’d probably eat oatmeal or our chicken eggs for breakfast. But dinner… would still be homecooked something.

That said, I still think some things are worth beans and rice. If my Love agreed to make the full time homesteading adventure work on the condition that we’d eat beans and rice for lunch for two years… as crazy as it sounds, I’d be up for it. I know we’d have slip ups here and there, but committing to the goal would be motivation to keep going. I’d have a little beans and rice party every day in my head laughing and saying my thanks about not eating lunch in a cubicle any more. But if beans and rice would be enough to live the dream, then let’s modify the dream for beans and rice lunches for a couple years!