Can you take advantage of WIC prices even if you don't qualify for the program?

If you're not aware, WIC stands for low-income (pregnant or nursing) Women, Infants, and (young) Children. It's a federal food assistance program designed to improve nutrition specifically for this demographic. This is a different program from SNAP (food stamps). SNAP provides a dollar amount for qualifying citizens and legal residents, based on income and not gender or age. 

WIC provides e-coupons (on a registered card) to obtain specific foods in specific amounts. The foods allowed are lower cost but high in nutritional value, covering basics like fresh, frozen, and canned fruits and vegetables, milk, whole grains, breakfast cereal, peanut butter, dried beans, canned fish (tuna), tofu, and baby formula. The shopper selects the amounts of these foods allowed, receives them for free, and the store is reimbursed by the federal government. Most stores use shelf tags to indicate whether or not a food is WIC eligible.

To keep costs for this tax payer-funded program under control, state agencies use various cost containment strategies, such as limiting eligible products to specific container sizes or specific brands. For example, at WinCo today I noticed that one brand and size can of tuna was WIC eligible, while other brands and sizes were not. I compared the unit price on the price tag of the various brands and sizes, and the WIC eligible one was the least expensive per ounce. You would think that the family-size can would be less expensive per ounce than the smaller 5-oz can. But it's the reverse. From the USDA's website, the federal government encourages competitive bidding for authorized foods. While the government doesn't set the prices for each WIC eligible item, it encourages states to limit WIC eligible items to those brands/sizes that are lowest in price. This can influence pricing set by manufacturers on specific brands and sizes of each item.

Okay, so I am obviously not eligible for WIC. So how can WIC help me (or you)?

First of all, the WIC price is the same price for all consumers. There isn't a different price set for WIC recipients vs. ordinary consumers. But the price on WIC products is mostly the best value for nutrition in the above mentioned specific categories.

Some states require grocery stores to use WIC identifying labels on the shelves for eligible products. Other states don't require this, but encourage or allow stores to use state-provided tags to assist WIC shoppers find the right products. In some cases, the WIC tag is a separate shelf tag from the price tag, and in other cases the WIC information is on the shelf price tag. Sometimes it's just a capital "W" on the price tag. 

To be noted, fruits and vegetables are not restricted to size or brand, but to a fixed total dollar amount per month. However, stores may use WIC identifying labels on more common sizes of packages of fruits or vegetables or packages which represent the best value.

Once you figure out how your local stores identify WIC-approved foods, you can use this as a shortcut for finding lowest priced foods in specific categories. Our WinCo keeps the lowest priced (per unit cost) items covered by WIC on green tag (WinCo's "extra savings" products) longer than standard sales. The WIC eligible canned tuna has been on green tag for many months now. And this is the lowest price per ounce can. In the frozen foods, I noticed today that the 16-ounce package of mixed vegetables had the WIC tag, but the 32-ounce package did not. This could have been an oversight by the store, or it could have indicated that this is both the best value (price per ounce for this product) as well as most commonly purchased size. When I compared unit pricing, the 16-ounce was indeed the less expensive option. If I were a WIC shopper, I could use this info to help me get the most produce for my family for the limited dollar amount allowed. As a non-WIC shopper, I can also use this info to get the most produce for my family for my limited budget.

Basically, WIC-approved foods represent best nutritional density in their categories while at the lowest unit price. And you can find these foods easily by scanning for WIC shelf labels.

How to Put On a Frugal Birthday Celebration: 6 Tips for Birthdays on a Budget

Guess who took another lap around the sun, as of this week? Yep, that would be me. Thursday is my birthday.

Since my mother is no longer around to plan my birthdays for me, I've been making my own plans for the day. And as you know, we do birthdays frugally (shocker, I know) in our family. We all want to have a special day on our birthday, but special doesn't have to break the bank. Today I'll share with you how I plan to have a fabulously frugal birthday later this week, complete with candle on a "cake" and some fun activities.

Whether planning a celebration for my kids in their younger days or a special year for one of us as adults, I consider 6 aspects where I can choose to spend or to save: venue, menu, time of day, activities/entertainment, communication, and decorations. Here's what I've chosen for my special day.

Venue

Where we'll celebrate can be the most expensive part of a celebration or not at all expensive. We can choose to dine in a restaurant, or we can choose to eat from home (whether at home or picnic from home). This year I'm choosing to eat breakfast and dinner at home, cooked from scratch. I have a couple of giftcards that we may use for lunch. Alternatively for lunch, we may buy something to eat at the little market we'll visit.

Budget Venues: public places (parks, beaches), home, free community rooms or church social halls

Menu

Even more influential in the final cost for birthday celebrations is the food choices. Restaurant dining has become rather expensive in recent years. Groceries have also gone up in cost. Yet, scratch-cooked meals don't seem to have suffered nearly as much from inflation as restaurant meals. Despite this, there are ways to enjoy dining out that are budget-friendly. Our family chooses counter-service restaurants as opposed to table service. We also choose lunch over dinner out. We tend to eat less at lunch than we do at dinner. So if we want to eat out on a birthday, a counter service lunch will be the most budget-friendly. This is also a great time to use squirreled away gift cards. for my daughters' birthday, we used a Panera gift card at lunch time and didn't even exhaust the gift card. Of course, we ordered carefully from the budget options.

As I said above, we'll be having breakfast and lunch at home. I've requested bacon, papaya, and toast for breakfast and mushrooms burgers with sweet potato fries for dinner with strawberry shortcake for dessert. I'll be picking up the bacon, papaya, mushrooms, frozen sweet potato fries, strawberries, and canned coconut milk (to make a whipped topping I can eat) at WinCo when I do my regular shopping tomorrow. Our lunch out will either be covered by a gift card or I'll use some cash at the market we'll visit.

Budget Menus: cook from home, use gift cards that you already have, potluck

Time of day

The time of day one choose to celebrate impacts the bottom line, too, but to a lesser degree. That is unless you're planning a table service meal. Breakfast or lunch out are almost always less expensive than dinner out. And coffee out (we did a coffee date for our anniversary last year) or an ice cream cone is even more frugal. The same goes for having a celebration at home. If we were inviting guests, expectations for food and beverages would be less for an event in the middle of the afternoon compared to lunchtime or evening. When we hosted celebrations for our daughters' university graduations, we set the time in mid-afternoon, when a hearty snack might be the expectation for the guests.

Budget time of day: mid-afternoon or any time a full meal is not expected, such as morning coffee gathering or after dinner ice cream outing

Activities or entertainment

Here's where our family demonstrates our birthday frugality perhaps the most. We almost always choose free activities or entertainment for parties. When my kids were little, we set up games and activities in the house for them. One year we used a bunch of packing boxes to build a castle for the kids to play in. Another year we let the kids paint on a wall we planned on painting over anyway in a few months. We had treasure hunts, picnics in the park, used passes we had been gifted to take kids to the science museum, and watched free entertainment at the Seattle Center. As adults, we've had tea parties, cookouts, beach picnics, park picnics, watched movies on streaming or dvds, played board games, window shopped in the vintage district, and visited local greenhouses and arboretums. All of the entertainment above was basically free. 

This year's entertainment will be a trip to a place my son and daughter-in-law have visited. Last year, for my birthday gift, they gave me money to spend at this place. I am just now getting to go there. It has several greenhouses, free-roaming chickens, grounds to explore, a statuary and pottery center, plants and trees for purchase, and a market that sells locally produced/raised/harvested foods and beverages. Our lunch may come partially from this market, using my gifted spending money.

Budget activities or entertainment: free concerts and dance recitals, free days at museums, art/craft at home, outdoor games like frisbee at the park, visits to arboretums and greenhouses, boardgames, movies on streaming or dvds, music through Spotify, dvd concerts played on your TV

Communication

Do you remember as a child getting a physical invitation from a classmate to their birthday party? Perhaps you helped your mom or dad address the invitations to your own party. When my kids were young, I made invitations, using colorful paper I had at home. Today you can use free tools like Canva to design professional-looking invitations. But most of us now rely on phone calls, texts, emails, or digital invites through sites like Evite. Digital invitations are a nice hybrid of digital communications like phone or text and a decorative and creative invitation reminiscent of the paper kind. Sites like Evite offer a free tier that allows access to some of the templates and offers RSVP tracking. Of course, they try to upsell you to a subscription service or paid "Premium" option. I do think physical invitations are still the norm for weddings, though. For my own birthday, a phone call is sufficient for those outside of our household.

Budget Communications: homemade physical invites free-hand or using Canva, digital invites such as through Evites, personal communication

Decorations

For the most part, if we're at home, we use what we have. We light candles or put up string lights. If serving a meal, we use our dining room, tablecloths, nice dishes etc. When my kids were little, we "decorated" with balloons, homemade banners and that was it. As adults, if the birthday person is female and are gifted flowers, then those flowers become the table decoration. While one could purchase themed decorations from Party City and other party retailers, our family prefers to either use what we have in the house already, or home-make something, such as a photo wall or birthday banner. For my birthday decorations, we'll use candles and perhaps flowers on the table.

Budget Decorations: use what have at home, such as candles, string lights, photographs or digital slide shows, make banners, centerpieces using flowers from your garden or your own nature collections