Live Below The Line challenges people to eat on $2 a day for five days to raise money for charity. Two years ago, I undertook the similarly-themed Mastercheap challenge. Can I adapt that $3.50 a day budget to work for even less?
It was a year ago that I embarked on the Mastercheap experiment — feeding myself on a budget of just $25 for an entire week while maintaining a balanced diet. That proved to be much easier than many people anticipated, but it turns out I could have done it for even less money in the UK.
During Lifehacker’s Mastercheap experiment, I reached the conclusion that house brand foods were often indistinguishable from their mainstream counterparts, despite only costing half as much. A cross-brand comparison by Choice goes one step further and suggests that in some categories store-brand products actually taste better than their big-brand rivals.
The main reason for my rush visit to Dubbo yesterday was to test how the wireless broadband worked. But while I was there, I also wanted to investigate how well the budget from the recent Mastercheap project I conducted to eat for a week for $25 would have worked if I happened to live there.
I came, I spent $25, and I didn’t starve. But what lessons does Mastercheap hold for anyone trying to get better value from their shopping on an ongoing basis?
Just how much difference would it have made to the Mastercheap project if I hadn’t relied almost entirely on store brand products? An enormous amount, it turns out.
