The emergency fund you can eat

Having a substantial cash emergency fund is an important financial goal, but it's not an easy one. Building up enough savings to cover three months' worth of expenses can take some families years to accomplish, as they struggle with more pressing goals, such as paying off credit card debt and saving for retirement.

Fortunately, there's another kind of emergency fund that's a lot easier to put together: a well-stocked pantry.

Having just two weeks' worth of food on hand can:

• Tide you over through a short period of unemployment, a shortfall before payday or any other occasion when you need to conserve cash.
• Prepare you for an emergency, such as a natural disaster.
• Save you money, if you do it right.
• Save you stress, since there will always be something to cook for dinner.

Pantries actually predate rainy-day funds as a way to protect families from the unforeseen, but many people never learned the habit of stocking up -- or they've been going about it the wrong way, as I did for many years.

The key to a good pantry is actually pretty simple: You need to store food you actually eat.

Not "food you might resort to in a dire emergency" or "food some leftover Y2K calculator says you should stock." Food you actually eat, right now.

Because otherwise your pantry becomes a food mausoleum, another well-intentioned idea that doesn't quite work, costs you a pile of money and ultimately gets abandoned when you get sick of looking at all the dusty bags of soy flour.

I speak from experience. I can't tell you how many years I hung onto crumbling bags of ramen noodles, unwilling to admit that -- after using them as a staple in my diet during some lean years -- I was never, ever going to eat ramen noodles again. I'd go rummaging for grubs on the nearby hillside first.

(I'm not the only one who's preserved food over common sense. My editor, good Southern boy that he is, admits hauling a can of turnip greens through not just one but two moves. If the desire to be prepared and not to waste has ever resulted in food you couldn't in good conscience even give away, then you can relate.)

Fortunately, a smart pantry is fairly simple to set up with these steps:

First, think about what you eat morning, noon and night. Our usual breakfasts, for example, consist of cold cereal, oatmeal or pancakes with milk and some kind of fresh fruit or juice. Lunches are sandwiches (we have a big peanut-butter fan in the house) with milk and fruit.

Video on MSN Money: Saving for disaster

Build an emergency fund
It's a stash of cash, but how much do you need? Here are some guidelines and why this should take priority over other savings goals.

Dinners usually involve chicken breasts, ground turkey or pasta with side dishes that typically include salad and vegetables. (As you can probably tell, we're not gourmets, but we eat well.) Since we have a preschooler, goldfish crackers and various cookies are on the menu; you'll probably want to include snacks and desserts when you make your list.

If you eat out a lot, you may be stumped at first. Just focus on meals you could make easily at home, preferably ones without too many ingredients. Once you have these foodstuffs on hand, who knows? You may actually start cooking once in a while.

Figure out roughly how much of these foods you'd eat in two weeks. Coming up with a basic pantry list is as easy as listing the ingredients in those most commonly eaten meals, and making sure you have enough to make three squares a day for two weeks for everyone in the family, plus one. (The "plus one" is either a fudge factor, or a way to accommodate an unexpected guest in an emergency.) Make sure you think about everything that goes into your meals -- eggs for the pancake batter, olive oil for the pasta, potatoes to go with the meatloaf, for example. Don't forget to include the pets and commonly used supplies like diapers, toilet paper and paper towels. If anyone's on medication, a two-week supply of that is prudent as well.

• Video: Eating healthy on the cheap

Come up with some rational substitutes. We eat a lot of fresh and frozen foods, which are both problematic. It's tough to keep enough produce and dairy on hand to last two weeks; too much of it will spoil before you use it up. Frozen foods are great until the power goes out; even if you don't open the door much, the contents of a freezer will start to thaw within a couple of days.

Our plan in a disaster or blackout, then, is to eat out of the fridge first, then move on the freezer, keeping all the shelf-stable pantry foods like pasta, canned chili and rice for last.

Canned and dry foods can substitute for fresh, but only if you at least occasionally eat them. If you can't stand the taste of canned vegetables, for example, it makes little sense to stock them. Better to buy a few more cans or shelf-stable boxes of vegetable soup, if that's what you prefer and will actually consume now and then. There are plenty of good substitutes for fresh fruit, fortunately; we've got berries and fruit of various kinds in the freezer, dried blueberries, fruit juice and banana chips in the pantry, and canned peaches galore. All these are foods we eat at least occasionally now; we keep enough extra on hand to get us through at least a week without other fresh fruit.

Milk is another product you can stockpile in the freezer, by the way. Just remove about a half-cup from each gallon before freezing to compensate for expansion. We also keep bread, butter and cheese in our freezer, along with meats, vegetables and the occasional pizza.

Other products we stock include dry milk, evaporated milk and egg substitutes. I use these up before their expiration dates by incorporating them into cakes, cookies, puddings and other recipes. (Reconstituted dry milk by itself makes me gag, but I've found its taste to be undetectable in baked goods.)

Extend your definition of pantry. As long as you're preparing for emergency, think about what you'd need to cope with an extended period without power or water. The Red Cross has all kinds of information about what to have on hand, but at the very least you should have bottled water (a gallon per person per day for at least three days), sources of light (lanterns and flashlights, not just candles) and some kind of non-electric cooker. We've got propane stoves we use for camping, plus a good-old fashioned Weber barbecue (with several sacks of charcoal on hand). Just remember to cook outside. The point is not to survive the earthquake, windstorm or flood and then die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Stock up as you go. Stocking a whole pantry in a single outing to the grocery store would be expensive, particularly if you're starting from scratch. A better approach is to look for sales of the items on your pantry list, and stock up then. Most stores have cycles for their sale items; if your store discounts your favorite brand of cereal every six weeks, for example, buying extra during those events will tide you through the weeks when the regular price is in force. Taking advantage of these cycles will ultimately save you money.

Video on MSN Money: Saving for disaster

Build an emergency fund
It's a stash of cash, but how much do you need? Here are some guidelines and why this should take priority over other savings goals.

If you're short on space, you may wonder where to put all this food. Some folks stick the shelf-stable stuff in unlikely places, including under beds and in linen closets. Personally, I need to see the food to remember to eat it, so I keep it in sight on shelves in the kitchen and in a nearby laundry room. Another possibility: Donate to charity all those kitchen appliances and pans you never use, along with the dusty soy flour, and park the food in that freed-up storage space.

Rotate. This means more than just putting your newly purchased cans on the shelf behind the older versions of the same food (although that's a good idea).

You need to patrol your refrigerator, pantry and freezer to make sure the food in your stockpile gets used before it goes bad. A daily glance through your fridge, a weekly inspection of your pantry shelves and a monthly tour of your freezer can alert you to what foods need to be incorporated in the coming days' meals.

Many products these days have "use by" dates on them. Some don't, though, so it might help to keep the above list and a black marker handy in your pantry so that you can write your own expiration dates right on the box, can or jar.

• Video: Eating healthy on the cheap

A pantry mentality also means you never run out of an essential. If you keep two big canisters of oatmeal on hand, as we do, you put "oatmeal" on your grocery-buying list as soon as the first canister is empty and you take its replacement from the pantry.

You may notice some side effects from your pantry experiment, including:

• Fewer panicked runs to the grocery store.
• Less waste as you get more conscientious about using up what you have.
• A healthier family, since foods prepared at home are better for you than most take-out.
• A desire to expand your pantry to last beyond two weeks.

If the latter hits you, go slow. You want to learn how to manage a smaller pantry before shooting for a bigger one, or otherwise you risk too much waste.

Once you get the hang of it, though, keeping a pantry stocked involves pretty minimal effort. And it has a huge payoff: peace of mind.

Columns by Liz Pulliam Weston, the Web's most-read personal finance writer, appear every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. She also answers reader questions on the Your Money message board.

Published March 15, 2007