3 Things I learned About Sickness and Budgets

This past week I was sick.  You know, the sick where just lifting your head off the pillow requires effort.  This happened while working at staying on a food budget and limiting the cost of feeding my family to $150 every two weeks.  Boy did I learn that when mama doesn't care about the budget, no one cares about the budget!  Ease won out a few times and I definitely learned something from it.

So I made a very simple list of things I will have in place for the next time I am this sick.  I hope this helps you stay on budget, too!

1.  Have a reserve for medical expenses.  While medicine costs can vary greatly, I know how much I have to pay to go see the doctor and how much the most basic of antibiotics will be.  I am now going to have this amount reserved somewhere in an envelope or the bank that I can draw on when someone is sick.  This way I will not have to take from savings (or an emergency fund) to pay for it all.  Bonus points if you put enough for each family member when you all get sick in one month.
2. Have a few freezer meals.  My family is not big into eating freezer meals.  Boy have I tried. I can get away with some lasagna (like this one) but that is about it.  Well, that lasagna would have been very handy this past week instead of the Taco Bell we had…twice.  So I plan on making a couple freezer meals just in case.  I will also put those into my meal plan and ‘trade’ them out once every couple of months so they will not go bad in the freezer.
3. Talk about roles.  No, not delish yeast rolls but duties. The first thing I had to do when I was well enough was to wash a few dishes.  Normally, my role is loading the dishwasher (I do this, my husband does all trash cans).  My husband hadn’t taken over for me so when I was able to get out of bed and wanted to eat, I had to wash a fork.  Not my idea of recuperation!  I talked with my husband and he agreed that in the future, he would take note of all the dishes and would load the dishwasher (and he actually did for me the next morning).  And how does this tie in with the budget?  Because I was *this close* to ordering some takeout because I was still pretty weak.  We had food I could eat, but doggone, I had to wash a fork.  
   
   Literally, I went to the kitchen looked things over, had food out to eat, saw there was no fork, went and laid back down, got back up because of my complaining stomach, went back to the kitchen, looked at things again, turned around to leave and then decided to stick with the budget and washed the dang fork.  Yes, folks, pitiful but I was that sick.

So these are my suggestions on things to do now before sickness hits your house and causes you to think about blowing your budget.  Do you have any other suggestions?