Preparing for our Annapurna adventure and recording all our learning from it is helping the kids learn how they can achieve their own goals.

Undoubtedly ‘money’ is a necessity if your goals are adventures like going to Nepal to hike around a mountain!

Kids have been working hard to save money for the gear we need to hike safely in Nepal, and have already saved over $500!

But we will also have to think about a daily budget for meals and accommodation while we are on our trek….to make this trip affordable for us we must set a daily limit.

Kids have both really enjoyed watching the ABC series ‘Teenage Boss‘ with Eddie Wu, where kids get to manage the family’s budget for a month.  So they set their own little challenge:

Planning and managing our meals/snacks for the whole family from a Monday to Friday, with $100 budget.

Aurora’s challenge:  Mon 10th Dec to Fri 14th Dec
Lucas’s challenge:    Mon 17th Dec to Fri 21st Dec.

Challenge guidelines :

• Plan breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for 5 days (Mon -Fri), with $100 budget.
• Shop for the food for the 5 days’ meals.
• Manage the food allocation to all family members, including cooking dinners, allocating lunches etc for the 5 days.
• If food that we already had in the fridge/cupboard was used, the cost of the item will need to be added to the expenditure.
• If spices/condiments used, then a proportion of the cost added eg. spoonful of curry powder might be 20 cents…as it is impossible to buy new condiments for all meals within the weekly budget.
• Kids get to keep any money left over!

Here is Aurora’s menu plan, she figured even on a budget she could make the food desirable and healthy, catering for everyone’s diet needs,  lots of veg, and a little treat of an After Eight Dinner mint each at the end of the day:

Here is her shopping list, she looked on the Woolworth’s website for the cost of each item, so that she could estimate the cost and ensure that she didn’t go over budget:

Aurora was given $100 cash, and off she went to the shops (with Lucas helping her).  Her shopping bill was $61.80.  She calculated that she was going to use $16 worth of food we already had in the cupboard.  So she came well under budget…and has $22.20 as a buffer over the week in case she underestimated the amount of food we need 🙂 …or gets to keep it if we don’t need anymore food!

She also edited this little video of the shop trip, ‘Teenage Boss’ style:

Awesome job up to now, but how will she go over the week with the food that she has bought???? Will we starve? We will have to wait till Friday to find out….

In the meantime, Aurora came home from a track session at 6.30pm Mon evening and got straight into making our dinner, then prepared Dad’s lunch for him to take to work…I think she has this better than Mum 🙂