Most people believe the best way to save money is to buy poor quality food from the grocery store that happens to be priced lower than the rest. While this is one way to get your finances in order, it is neither sustainable nor healthy. All the factory farming that is going on might help scale these businesses to provide cheap food, but they don’t help you on the bottom line. This is where whitetail deer hunting might be a way out.

The whitetail deer is one of the largest game animals in the United States with a huge population across the country. They are plentiful, they provide many pounds of great quality meat, and it doesn’t have to be expensive to do so. In this article, we will provide a brief rundown of how you might be able to hunt your own meat and save money all the while.

How Much Does Hunting Really Cost?

For many people, hunting seems like a foreign concept. Urbanites who have been raised in the city their whole lives don’t always recognize that hunting does not have to be challenging. In fact, if you simple get an outfitter for a hunting trip, it is really easy to ensure you have a successful hunt (also called a harvest).

Once you purchase the basic equipment of a rifle (no more than $3-400) all you have to do is pay the outfitter to help you find the meat. In certain places (such as Texas), it is quite easy to ensure you get meat because the animals are in a specific fencing situation that forces them to feed in the same places every day.

At the end of your rifle hunt, you might pay less than $20 per pound of meat. Once you get good enough, that might go down to $5-10. Considering many types of red meat at the grocery store are more expensive than that (even with poor quality), it is a good way to save a lot of money over the course of your lifetime.

Of course, the true value is less about the saving money and more about the quality of the meat. While any reader of this finance blog will love squirreling money away for the future, the reality is that sacrificing our health in order to do that is never a good idea. With the right methodology, you can ensure to have a high quality source of meat without breaking the bank.