Hello! I would love to hear from larger families. We have 4 kids and while I don't consider that large it seems very large compared to most people here. I would love to hear what you drive. We drive an 04 Toyota minivan with 165,000 miles and an 97 Toyota t-100 with 140,000 miles. I would love to hear how much you spend on groceries. We spend 700-800 a month and we are working on getting that down. We home school and our kids are 11, 9, 4 and 4. Anyone else here with larger families? Any tips? Our utilities are high also but we live in Arizona and we have a pool. We keep our thermostat at 78-80. We do have a small AC unit for our house though.
I grew up in a family of 4 active boys, so while I don't have direct information, I know for sure my parents were not spending $700/mo in food.
A few thoughts:
- Bulk food and making things from scratch is the way to go. If you're not buying rice/flour/beans/etc in 50lb bags or so, start doing so and store the excess (you can use coffee cans, 5 gallon buckets with screw top lids and liners, whatever). With that many kids, you should be cooking in bulk. While I wasn't a huge fan of them, I understand why bean-based soups were common growing up.
- If time is an issue, prepare stuff ahead of time and store it. We had two fridge/freezer combos (upstairs in the kitchen, and a storage one downstairs in the basement), plus a full size deep freezer in the basement. My mom made soup en masse and froze a lot of it. Same for other quick dishes that could be heated up. The fridges meant we could buy large quantities of things and keep them until we ate them.
- Costco or Sam's Club. Seriously worth the membership cost at the volumes of food you're consuming.
- DIY baking mixes and such can be made ahead of time and save money over store-bought stuff.
- A bread machine is a worthwhile investment. You can make bread radically cheaper than you can buy it, especially if you buy ingredients in bulk, and a heavy potato bread will fill up growing kids cheaply. That the bread goes moldy in a few days doesn't matter if it's consumed in a day - we were making and eating somewhere over a loaf a day when I was in high school (usually one for sandwiches, and another loaf as bread for dinner).
- Look into a garden, if you don't have one. Drip watering systems + the amount of sun you get should open up a lot of options for home grown food, and you have a good bit of labor to use for garden maintenance. :)
- If you have the freezer space, you can buy animals in bulk and get meat cheaply. "Going in on a cow with some friends" is totally a thing in most rural areas, and you can get a half cow or quarter cow for a fraction the cost per pound you'd pay at the store. You need the freezer space to store it, though.
With regards to the pool, are you using a solar heating system for it? If not, look into that (either build your own or, if needed, get one installed). You shouldn't be paying for the energy to heat the pool in AZ with the amount of sun you get.
Okay. For you to FIRE you must get rid of no less than two of those things. Cash absorbing little fiends, children are, and they will delay your retirement by many years.
... you realize there's more to life than FIRE, right?