Tour Josh's Pantry!!

The pictures below were taken on August 28th, 2007. On January 1, 2007, we had nothing you see in this room. We kept minimal inventory to "save money," bought generic and store brand products, and "tried" to work the sales. Believe it or not... since the time we took these pictures, we were able to install even more shelves for more inventory!

  • We didn't increase our grocery budget $1. In fact, we cut it by more than $100 each month. (Some months MUCH more)
  • What you won't see in the pictures below is the $100+ in products that my family and I are able to give to charity each month out of that reduced grocery budget. (More than $3000 a year). We were seldom able to do anything like that previously. The inventory you see below is inventory that is constantly MOVING. We don't keep piles of product - just to "keep" it.
  • We have many other products throughout the home & garage - not included in these pictures.
  • We have and continue to consume more than $500 worth of products each month.
  • How did we do it?

    SavingsAngel.com

A personal note: One thing we had wanted to to do since starting this pantry is get to a point where we could open it up to a local pantry and have its recipients take all they needed from our collection.  We did this during the month of September 2008 - keeping only about 20% of what you see below.  We are now enjoying the process of rebuilding!  The greatest joy from the gifts we gained from our own SavingsAngel membership is being able to give!

Here is the room that now pays us more than $200 rent each month. (Our Savings each month!)

In case you are curious, we have more than 70 boxes of cereal in the home. Cereal is a great product to get for next to free when you use SavingsAngel. We recently gave away dozens of boxes of cereal, too.

What is difficult to appreciate is the fact that these products go all the way to the wall. 43 sticks of deodorant, 37 packs of razors, 40 tubes of toothpaste are on hand for giving at any opportunity. Again... something we couldn't do before SavingsAngel.


There is a wall of toothpaste and toothbrushes behind this one too. I am now able to easily give away 10-20 toothpastes a month - because I generally get them for free.

Vitamins and medicines - most were free.

We have 45 bottles of shampoo in the pantry. Most were free.
We have given away LOTS of shampoo!!

Approximately 27 gallons of water - about 1/3 of where we want to be - but one step at a time as our budget allows... We finally started paying attention to storing water - an essential item for emergency preparedness!

I had to try and paste two pictures together of our freezer. It was hard to get it all in the picture. It's getting hard to find any more room in the freezer. In January, we had a total of 6 items in our freezer.

What I can't include in the pictures is:

  • The emotional satisfaction of not having to feel like we're always running out of things.
  • Not feeling that tiny bit of anxiety from having to come up with more than $500 each month.
  • Having our children never say the words, "there isn't anything to eat".
  • The pain we now avoid in passing up opportunities to give because we felt "we didn't have enough."
  • The pleasure from teaching other people how to fill their pantries at no additional cost!