How many times have you found that the food you buy has expired dig into your fridge and found rotten food stuck at behind because you have just too much food in it? Why not go Just In Time when it comes to purchasing?

Introduction
One of the things I tried when trying to lose weight was counting calories.  During that time, I found a good source of protein was Essence of Chicken.  At the time I was all hyped to reach my goal of losing more than 20 kg to achieve my ideal weight.   As such, I started stocking up on Essence of Chicken.   For those who are familiar with this product, it is not cheap.  However, at the time, there seem to be sale on this particular product.  Also my family being supportive decided to also buy for me.    After I reached my target weight, I decided to stop taking Essence of Chicken but I found out that I had still more than a dozen bottles without an urge to finish it.

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That got me thinking, how many things we buy in bulk when the crave hits but at the end of the day we have a lot of it but no longer want it anymore.

My son at one time loved eating Chicken Nuggets.  He just could get enough of it.  So we started buy bags of Nuggets to stock in our freezer.  After a few weeks, he just refused to eat and we had a very hard time clearing it from the fridge.

JIT
I then decided an experiment, why not try JIT (Just In Time) for almost any purchases we can think of.   This was initially practiced in Japanese companies but a lot of other companies have since followed suit.  I thought why can’t we do that with our own personal finance since we can manage ourselves as a company.

For example, my children love ice cream and we used to buy tubs of it.  Now we just buy once in a while and found that it was actually more enjoyable and we ended up spending less even though individually the ice cream cost more.  The same goes with junk food.  Instead of buying in bulk, we now buy individual packets and only occasionally.    The children actually enjoyed it more.

We also used to have a lot of cans (and packages) of food go to waste because we would stock up and a lot of them expired by the time we got to it or when we cleared our cupboard.   With JIT where we bought only 1 to 2 cans for immediate consumption, we no longer see much waste. 

I realize sometimes when we purchase in bulk, we get huge discount but is the discount big enough to offset the loss from disposing food that goes bad or are beyond the expiration date?  There is also additional cost which we don’t think when buying in bulk – i.e. the cost of finding storage for them and the amount of time we waste stocking and clearing them.

Caveat

There are of course certain situations when the JIT concept may not be applicable.  The only one I can think of is if you stay very far from the shops and the cost of gas and time far outweighs the saving you will get from practicing JIT.  In this situation, you may want to consider a buffer – i.e. JIT + 3 day or something to that effect.  That is instead of Just In Time, you may want to buy enough for a week or a few days.