How one Kiwi mum spends only $5000 a year on food for her family

Stacey Scott started filming cost-effective meals because she wanted to share her knowledge. Photo / NZ Woman’s Weekly
In her own words, Stacey Scott reveals how she went from saving lives to saving money with these budget-busting tips.
I talk to 32,000 people almost every day. It’s hard for me to believe I’ve built that many followers on YouTube in a year.
It started when I quit my job. I loved being an ambulance officer but retired for health reasons. I’ve had trigeminal neuralgia for 10 years. It’s a rare neurological condition; your trigeminal nerve runs across your cheek and down your jaw. You have nerve pain from brushing your teeth or your hair, or too much smiling amongst other things. It’s excruciating pain and I’ll require brain surgery.
I didn’t feel safe to drive an ambulance or treat patients because the medication gives you brain fog.
So I was like, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with myself now?’ I needed to be careful with money and while there were YouTube videos about budget cooking, I couldn’t find many that were from New Zealand.
We raised six kids on a single income. I wanted to share my knowledge, so I started filming cost-effective meals, and Farmers Wife Homestead was born.
There are some horrible bullies online, but I get so much in return for putting myself out there. The community’s an amazing bunch of people. That’s what keeps me going.
My dad was a farm manager. The farm provided us with meat and that’s where I learned my love of gardening. Mum was an amazing cook. I learned from watching her. Then when I became a mum, I learned to cook from scratch.
My first husband wasn’t a farmer, although we did a stint dairy farming because I convinced him it was a great lifestyle. We absolutely loved it, but ended up separating.
Raising six children was pretty much a full-time job. But I would volunteer at kindergarten and teach elderly men how to cook once their wives had died.
When the children were little, it wasn’t all about how much stuff they had. We went to the toy library and second-hand shops.
I did my OE for four years in Western Australia where I have family and took the children – they were in their late teens down to 3 years old – and worked in restaurants honing my skills as I’m not a trained chef.
I met Karl, a father of three, eight years ago, when I was living in Tauranga. I moved to Raglan to be with him and we’ve been married for seven years – I even catered our wedding.
I love budgeting. I save every food receipt to compile a list of what I will need in future. It helps me work out what to bulk buy. It’s also a guide of what vegetables I need to plant, so I can save money there. Your grocery bill is probably one of your biggest variables – if you can control what you’re spending, you start saving.
It doesn’t mean buying everything in bulk, it’s about learning what to shop for that will last the year and save money. I bulk up expensive food items with cheaper ones.
I can get 38 servings for $30, using two chickens. I make sweet and sour, chicken pot pie, nachos, chicken subs and I use the carcass as stock for pumpkin soup. I make a loaf of sandwiches and freeze them, I bake and buy produce in season. We don’t eat out – it’s too expensive – so I make “fakeaways” such as fish and chips, burgers and pizza.
I’ve set myself a challenge – to spend only $5000 on food in a year to feed three adults and a teenager. I have a daily budget of $14, but I do keep a well-stocked pantry and have plenty of preserves on hand.
We’re tracking a little over budget because I hurt my back and couldn’t garden, and then I had a knee operation, so I cooked ahead and did freezer meals. Now I’m not spending as much.
I would love to start a second YouTube channel on budgeting. I get a lot of comments from elderly through to young people at university who don’t have much money.
I’m not great with technology, so learning how to run a website and start a YouTube channel’s been a full-time job. I find it really rewarding. Saving people’s lives was really rewarding. Saving people money’s pretty rewarding too.
For more info, visit farmerswifehomestead.com