Part of living with chronic illness and autoimmune disease has meant figuring out how to take care of our health with the limited amount of funds we have available to spend on it.
Normal budgets don’t have to account for ultra-expensive groceries, a protocol of supplements for every person in the house, lots of health appointments and services per month, or health-related limitations on income. “Beans and rice, rice and beans” doesn’t work when you have strict dietary and nutrition needs that have drastic health consequences when they’re unmet.
It can feel really overwhelming trying to work out how you’re going to afford everything you need to stay functional while there is a hard limit on what you can spend. It sometimes feels like a lose-lose situation, because if you don’t have everything you need to stay functional health-wise, your capacity to work and make income reduces. Yet, you can’t magically make more funding appear to cover your health needs.
Over the years, Jonathan and I have learned (little by little) how to take care of our health on a budget. Today, I’d like to share our real life tips with you.
When we collectively share our experience and tried and true advice with one another, life with chronic illness and autoimmune disease feels a lot less overwhelming.
Jump to:
Groceries
Supplements and Herbs
Medical Appointments and Services
1. Groceries
If you know, you know. Trying to stick to a grocery budget when you have multiple food allergies, dietary restrictions, and nutritional needs in your household feels like an utterly impossible task.
When my husband and I first started working with our financial coach from church in 2024, I remember telling her I didn’t think anyone could help us get our grocery costs down. Almost every area of our budget was bare bones to accommodate our food expenses. We felt like we’d tried everything, and absolutely nothing could get our grocery costs down any further. I said if she could help us reduce it at all, I’d probably faint from shock.
I’m sure many of you can relate.
So many of the typical grocery cost-reducing tips don’t work for people with chronic illness and autoimmune disease. We already hardly go out to eat, because it’s too hard finding restaurants with options we can have, and the risk for cross contamination is high. Cooking at home certainly doesn’t make our food expenses any cheaper like it does for most people.
So what do we do? Some of the following tips we’ve already practiced for years, while others we just implemented in the last year, and they have helped immensely.
Meal Planning
Meal planning is genuinely a lifesaver. Each week, I plan four dinners, a week of meal-prep lunches and breakfast for me and Jonathan, and snacks. Each time I make dinner, I prepare enough servings to last two nights, so we don’t have to make something new every night. I create my grocery list based on the ingredients these meals require, plus any pantry staples we’re running out of that we will need in the next week.
I recommend keeping your everyday meals simple and not trying to force yourself to have too much of a rotation. It takes a lot less bandwidth to meal plan and cook when you have a smaller rotation, and simpler meals are often less costly.
Full disclosure, when it comes to special occasions like birthdays and holidays, I throw simplicity out the window. It takes a lot of time and effort to make fancier meals for special occasions, but it adds joy to our lives – which is also an important part of staying healthy!
Why this helps: Without a meal plan, grocery shopping becomes a little bit of a wildcard. You might buy what looks good, or keep your fridge and pantry stocked with a variety of items each week without a plan. Costs add up when you do this, because you may purchase more than you need to eat in a week and food may spoil in the fridge. Or, you may not buy enough, and keep having to go back to the store for more, and each trip racks up the month’s grocery bill further. When you have a meal plan, you only buy exactly what you need to eat for the week, little to no food spoils, and you limit trips to the grocery store.
Fine-Tuning Where We Shop
Simply put, we find the rock bottom prices on the groceries we need and buy everything we can at the cheapest store available. For us, this means our primary shopping is done at Aldi. Sometimes we pick up a couple of items at our local Walmart Neighborhood Market or Food Lion, too.
We reserve health food stores for specialty allergy-friendly/dietary-restriction items we can’t find anywhere else. Even then, we pay attention to the sales at these stores and stock up when our essentials go on sale.
If you use a grocery delivery or pickup service to do your main grocery shopping each week (like we do), pay attention to which stores increase their prices on the app you use. Near us, on Instacart, Aldi prices vary slightly, while Sprouts and Food Lion prices are the same as in person. Walmart doesn’t charge extra for groceries on their app, either. Earth Fare, Publix, and Harris Teeter are more expensive on Instacart, so if we need anything from those stores, we stop by in person.
Why this helps: It’s shocking how much prices on the same exact items can vary from store to store. You can easily save hundreds of dollars per month on groceries by making sure you are getting the best possible price on what you buy.
Choosing Priorities – What We Buy Organic vs. Not
While we would love to buy everything organic, to minimize GMOs and pesticides as much as possible, we can’t afford to do this. Most people can’t.
So what do we do instead?
If you can, it helps to prioritize which items matter the absolute most for you to purchase organic only. What could you flex on, even if it isn’t completely ideal?
For us, we feel the most strongly about purchasing organic-only animal products (organic grass fed beef, organic free range turkey and chicken, organic dairy, and pastured eggs). We also prioritize organic canned beans/chickpeas, to avoid the preservatives and BPA in the conventional ones, and organic/non-GMO soy (tofu and tempeh).
However, we don’t buy organic produce or pantry staples.
You can use this same logic with other food choices too. For example, does it matter more to minimize or eliminate lectins, or to purchase low-glycemic only? For us, low-glycemic wins due to my reactive hypoglycemia. Every person and family will be different.
Why this helps: Organic groceries can be anywhere from 1.3 to even 2 or 3 times more expensive than their conventional alternatives. That price inflation adds up so quickly. Groceries that work for specific dietary restrictions (like low carb, Keto, grain-free, lectin-free, etc.) will also be significantly more expensive than their traditional alternatives. If you choose which criteria are the absolute most essential for you and pass on the rest, you’ll save a significant amount of money.
Calculating Cost Per Meal/Serving
This trick has been a game changer and transformed our grocery costs in 2025! We’ve saved about $150-200 each month following this method.
You can do this by making a list of your most frequent breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks. Under each one, write a list of the ingredients required to make it, and the amount of each ingredient in the recipe.
From there, look up the cost of each ingredient on Instacart (or another online source). Multiply the ingredient by the amount needed in the recipe. For example, if a package of cheese contains 2 cups, and your recipe calls for 1 cup, multiply the price of the cheese by 0.5 and record it next to the ingredient under the recipe/meal title. Repeat this step until you’ve calculated the cost of each ingredient in each meal you wrote down. Once you’re finished, add up the cost of the ingredients for each meal, to get the total cost of each meal. Then, divide the meal cost by how many servings it makes to get the cost per serving. Don’t rush this – it’s time-consuming, but is worth taking your time over several days or weeks.
Here’s an example of what one of our meal breakdowns looks like:
Beef and Broccoli
– Banza “rice” (1/2 a bag) $1.97
– Aldi microwavable brown rice (2 pouches) $2.98
– Stew beef (1 lb) $9.74
– Liquid aminos (1/2 cup) $1.68
– Lakanto monkfruit allulose sweetener (2 Tbsp) 63 cents
– Chickpea flour (3 Tbsp) 17 cents
– Broccoli (2 heads) $2.15
$19.32 total ($3.22 per serving)
Once you’re finished, take a look at the data.
After going over our data, we decided to only make meals that cost less than $4 per serving. At first, we made a list of which meals fell into this criteria and drew from that list each week when meal planning. Later on, we learned we could make tweaks to more expensive recipes, to cut the cost down and make them work. For example, serve BBQ chicken with chickpea “rice” and vegetable pilaf instead of on GF low-carb bread as sandwiches. Or, serve chicken patties with bulk/bagged orange sweet potatoes from Aldi instead of individual white sweet potatoes from Sprouts. Or, make hamburger helper without cheese and use nutritional yeast instead. Making as many sauces (BBQ, enchilada, etc.) from scratch as you can really helps with this too.
Why this helps: If you can’t get your grocery costs down any other way, this will do it. It makes sure the meals you make are within a certain price range, so you can nearly guarantee what your grocery bill will be each week. You won’t be guessing how to make your meals cheaper, you’ll be able to do it strategically – ingredient by ingredient.
Combining Dietary Needs
This last tip is for people who have multiple dietary needs in one household. When you’ve got one person with multiple anaphylactic food allergies, a second person who eats plant-based, a third person with Celiac, and a fourth person on the AIP diet, trying to have something prepared that works for everyone makes you want to pull your hair out.
My tried and true strategy for this is to create meals with a main component that will work for everyone, with interchangeable parts for different dietary needs.
For example, if you’re making burrito bowls, you could make Mexican chicken, ground tofu, beans, white rice, and a variety of veggie toppings (lettuce, pico de gallo, fajita veggies, guacamole, etc.). Someone on the Paleo diet who can’t tolerate lectins can eat the chicken, rice, and veggies. Another person who is plant-based can eat the ground tofu, beans, rice, and veggies. A third person who can only eat low glycemic can eat the chicken, tofu, beans, and veggies.
For another example, you could make chicken alfredo with coconut cream (to make it dairy-free/low-lactose) and broccoli, but make seperate pastas. You could make cassava pasta for a grain-free person and chickpea pasta for a person who needs a gluten-free low-glycemic option – in the exact serving sizes they need, so you don’t waste ingredients on people who don’t need the option.
Why this helps: By preparing meals with a main component everyone can eat, you reduce ingredients you need to buy to feed everyone. Plus, you save time by not having to make a completely different meal for each different dietary restriction. Additionally, when you’re only making enough of a specialty ingredient to feed the person who needs it, you save money by not serving it to people who can eat more affordable options.
2. Supplements and Herbs
If you’ve ever cried over your budget at the end of the month, wondering how it’s possible for one person to have to spend so much on supplements, you’re not alone. The following tips have helped us reduce our monthly supplement costs to a feasible amount.
I won’t lie, what we spend would still probably make a non-chronically ill person cry, but people with chronic illness and autoimmune disease would be extremely impressed. Lol.
Shopping From iHerb (Big Discounts!)
We started purchasing our supplements from iHerb, because their prices beat out competitors, and they offer free shipping to 180+ countries without a subscription. They offer great promotional deals, too. Usually, we can get anywhere from 10-25% off our monthly order!
Their selection is huge, and they carry nearly every supplement brand. The only exception is brands that only sell through practitioners, like Pure Encapsulations.
Choosing Brands
This is a little bit of a heated topic in the alternative and complementary medicine space. Certain supplement brands claim to be higher quality than other brands, especially those that only sell to customers through practitioners. As a result, they charge a premium price. Many people believe these brands are superior and feel strongly about purchasing only from them. Which is fair. It’s your body, your health, and you have to go with whichever brands you feel are safest and most effective for you.
However, loads of well-established brands are GMP-certified, do third-party testing on their products, and have high quality ingredients – without the price gouging.
We look for supplement brands that offer competitive pricing, while still offering high quality ingredients.
Supplement companies can patent product names, but they can’t patent ingredients. If brand A sells a patented product for $75, but brand B sells a nearly identical formula under a different name for $25 – there is often nothing inferior about brand B’s product.
If you take the time to do your research and find the lowest prices for the supplements you need, without sacrificing quality – it will save you a significant amount of money.
Reducing Overlap
You’d be surprised how many of your supplements might share similar ingredients. Your multivitamin might contain everything your thyroid support supplement contains, with the exception of maybe a couple of herbs. Your histamine-reducing supplement might contain quercetin, along with your immune-modulating supplement.
We watch out for this kind of overlap for two reasons.
- It can be dangerous to go over the Upper Tolerable Limit for many vitamins and minerals. If many of your supplements contain high levels of certain vitamins and minerals, this could harm your health.
- Taking multiple products with similar or nearly identical ingredients means you’re spending money on one or more products that have redundant effects. A supplement has the greatest value when it has an essential effect only it provides.
So back to the thyroid support supplement example. If your multivitamin contains the same vitamins and minerals as your thyroid supplement in similar amounts, you may be able to discontinue your thyroid support supplement, and purchase any single herbs you’re missing for a lot cheaper.
Prioritizing What Matters Most
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s really easy to end up with a long list of supplements you started taking at the recommendation of various health practitioners, without knowing which ones are truly helping you.
We try to take the time to figure out whether or not each supplement we take is making a difference. If you haven’t done this in the past, you can ask your health practitioner to guide you through a supplement elimination trial, to see which ones are helping, which ones aren’t, and which ones may actually be making you worse.
If you discover you’re taking anything that is not helping, or even causing unwanted effects, you can save a decent amount of money by stopping those supplements.
Finding the Right Combinations
It takes some time and effort to research, but often it’s possible to find a product that contains 4-5 of the supplements you need in one blend, in the right amounts.
This can save so much money. While one product with a blend of ingredients may cost more than a single-ingredient product, the blended product costs a lot less than multiple single-ingredient products.
Making Your Herbal Products
This tip is short and sweet. If you take herbal tinctures or glycerites on a regular basis, you’ll save 80-90% by making them yourself instead of purchasing prepared versions.
We recommend purchasing your dried herbs from Mountain Rose Herbs. They offer a vast selection of ethically-sourced organic and wildcrafted herbs at the most competitive prices I’ve been able to find anywhere.
If this sounds like a huge, overwhelming undertaking – rest assured, it is not. It takes about 5 minutes to make one tincture or glycerite. Truly, it’s as simple as adding dried herbs to a jar and filling the rest with dilute alcohol or a combination of food-grade glycerin, distilled water, and dilute alcohol. You can learn how to make a tincture here.
In my next post, I’m going to share how we put together an affordable, effective supplement routine, with specific recommendations. Stay tuned!
3. Medical Appointments and Services
Direct Primary Care at Discounted/At-Cost Labs
At a certain point, I grew weary of my primary care doctor having no idea what my health conditions were, how to help me with them, or what I was taking for them and why.
I was completely self-treating – ordering and interpreting my own labs, reading about pharmaceutical and complementary/alternative treatment methods in depth (books, studies), developing my own treatment protocols, assessing what was helping and what wasn’t, and adjusting as needed. The only benefit I was getting from primary care was prescription medication I couldn’t acquire on my own.
I was exhausted bearing the entire load by myself, and I wished I could find a doctor who at least knew as much as I did about my conditions and treatment options and could give me guidance.
However, naturopathic and functional medicine doctors don’t take insurance much of the time, and their out of pocket costs are high. Not because they’re greedy or money-hungry, but because their time and expertise are valuable. And unfortunately, we (like many other people with chronic illness and autoimmune disease) couldn’t afford such high rates.
That’s when I did some research and discovered direct primary care (DPC).
Direct primary care doctors work outside of health insurance companies and major medical networks, in private practice. This means they aren’t bound by the same constraints most traditional medical doctors are. What this means for you is longer visits where you actually have the time to share your concerns and be heard (30-60+ minutes), more accurate notes because your doctor has time to chart thoroughly after appointments, and your doctor having a comprehensive understanding of your case because they have a smaller patient load and the time to go over your medical history and remember you.
While not all direct primary care offices are holistically-inclined, many of them are. This means they’re composed of providers who are Board Certified MDs, F-NPs, and PACs with additional training and certifications in holistic, naturopathic, or functional medicine.
You’ll get the best of both worlds – providers who have time for you, a deeper understanding of chronic illness from the root, and knowledge about complementary and alternative treatment methods, as well as the ability to prescribe medication when needed and refer out if you need a specialist, imaging, or a procedure.
The large majority of direct primary care practices take health insurance for lab work, and they offer discounted, at cost labs for patients without health insurance or with high deductibles.
You’re probably thinking, “This must come at a premium price, right? Who could afford this?”
The BEST part about direct primary care practices is that a large majority of them run on affordable, subscription-based fees.
In some cases, you’ll find a practice whose monthly fee is expensive. But a lot of the time, it’s a reasonable amount many people can fit into their budget without too much effort.
We go to Health Exchange Concierge Medicine in Pineville, NC. For $60 a month per person, we get unlimited in-person and virtual visits with our doctors and discounted/at-cost labs. Our practitioners are so knowledgeable and have been able to provide guidance, support, and expertise so we aren’t alone in navigating our complex health journeys anymore.
I highly recommend doing a search on Google Maps to see the direct primary care practices available in your area. You can browse their websites to get a feel for their pricing and to see whether their providers have holistic training.
This has completely transformed our healthcare experience. I want to share with as many people as possible, so others can experience the benefits of holistic direct primary care too.
Health Insurance, Sliding Scales, and Lab Work You Can Order Yourself
This might go without saying, but if you have health insurance with reasonable copays, it’s always a great idea to search for providers within your health insurance network.
Most health insurance companies have a portal you can login to and search for any kind of doctor, facility, urgent care, ER, hospital, etc.
Doing this, we’ve been able to get mental health therapy, physical therapy, and specialist appointments for only a small copay. The difference between working with a mental health therapist for $150 a session self-pay and $20 a session through insurance is huge. For many, it’s the difference between receiving the care they need or not.
Getting decent health insurance when you’re chronically ill and limited in funds can feel impossible, though. We struggled for years to afford any kind of health insurance, so we completely get it. You can check out my post How to Get Affordable Health Insurance When You’re Chronically Ill for innovative, real-life tips you might not have heard yet.
If you don’t have health insurance, I highly recommend searching for providers who offer sliding scale rates or “pay what you can” based on income.
We’ve been able to afford chiropractic care, my mental health therapy, and my craniosacral therapy because of providers who offer sliding scales. You do have to make some phone calls and ask around to find these options, but it’s so worth it when it means getting care you would not have otherwise been able to afford.
One especially helpful resource is Open Path Collective. They are a network of mental health therapists who offer sliding scale rates of $40-70 per session for clients who have a financial need.
If you don’t have health insurance or direct primary care with discounted/at-cost labs, you can order your own lab work through Walk in Lab.
It isn’t as affordable as getting lab work done through a direct primary care provider, but it’s an accessible way to get the testing you need if you don’t have a cheaper option. In the past, when Jonathan and I didn’t have health insurance, we would put our annual tax refund towards any lab work we needed and order it through Walk in Lab.
It’s not a perfect system, but it does work when you have limited choices and can’t go without the testing you need.
Payment Options for Expensive Medical Services
Some essential medical services are just extremely expensive, and there’s no way around it.
When I needed neurological rehabilitation for POTS from a functional neurology clinic in 2021 and 2022, it cost thousands and thousands of dollars.
Similarly, the neurofeedback I needed for years of complex sleep problems caused by neurological Lyme Disease and COVID cost a lot. $90 per session at first, eventually $75 per session after the first 40 visits, and I had to go 1-2 times per week. Most neurofeedback clinics charge even more than this per session.
These services are worth the money, no doubt. But what happens when you desperately need the services, but there is absolutely no way to pay for them up front?
At the time, I had Christian health sharing plan instead of traditional health insurance, which reimbursed for 40 therapy visits per need. Through this, I was able to afford two 5-month rounds of neurological rehabilitation at the functional neurology center and several neurofeedback sessions. We didn’t have the money to pay for the services up front, so we used a medical credit card and paid a little bit off at a time, whenever I received a reimbursement from my health sharing plan.
I’m aware most people don’t have a Christian health sharing plan that covers complementary and alternative treatments, though.
So what can you do if you find yourself in desperate need of an expensive medical service you can’t afford?
You have a couple of options.
- Many clinics offer payment plans, so you can reach out to them and ask about their payment plan options.
- If their payment plan options are still too expensive for you, you can apply for a medical credit card with a 0% APR promotional period. They come in options up to 18 months interest-free – the longer amount of time interest-free, the better, of course. This gives you the ability to pay for the service you need in full up front, and then you have 18 months to pay the balance without interest racking up the amount you owe.
- Explore which of the medical services or therapies you need that can be replicated at home for a fraction of the cost.
My neurological rehabilitation at the functional neurology clinic consisted of low-frequency PEMF therapy to increase oxygen to the brain, red light therapy for tissue repair, vagus nerve stimulation, eye tracking therapy, physical therapy to recondition my body, and neuromodulation/tilt table therapy to restore orthostatic tolerance. Out of these, the only service I absolutely had to go into the office for was neuromodulation/tilt table therapy.
If you know someone who has a PEMF mat, red light, and/or vagus nerve stimulation device, they may be willing to let you use their devices for free.
Alternatively, you can invest in one or more of these types of devices so you can use them at home long term, which usually ends up being significantly cheaper than the visits you would have needed otherwise.
I can do physical therapy and eye-tracking therapy at home for free, and I invested in a Pulsetto vagus nerve stimulator to use at home. It significantly improves my heart rate and orthostatic tolerance when I’m flared up, so I rarely need to go in for a maintenance visit to the functional neurology clinic anymore.
Providers of services like these are not generally profit-driven, and most of the time they are more than willing to help you save money and afford the treatment you need. Even if it means completing some of it at home, away from their office.
Last year, I was able to invest in a Vital Neuro neurofeedback system to continue neurofeedback treatment at home. We paid for it with an interest-free 12-month payment plan, which cost us $73 a month. We’re both able to use it an unlimited amount at home, compared to me having to pay $75 for just one session in-office.
It provides real EEG neurofeedback, with options to train on the Fz, Cz, or Pz scalp locations. The sensors attach to your head via the headphones provided, and sounds you hear change based on your brain wave activity, as the system guides your brain waves into an optimal state.
This is so helpful! I am curious when you make tinctures do you use a certain type of vodka or alcohol for the tincture? There are so many types I wonder which one is best. Thank you again for these great ideas!