This following is a post by MPFJ staff writer, Jeff. Jeff writes about sustainable living and finances at his website, Sustainable Life Blog. Jeff really enjoys traveling with his wife as much as he can, to wherever he can.
For the longest time, my wife and I couldn’t get our food spending under control. While our food spending seemed to go up and down at times, it was always higher than we’d like. We were never as bad as one blogger who used to spend $600 per month on fast food but we still seemed to spend quite a bit.
The worst part about our food spending is that when our fast food spending would go up, our grocery budget would stay the same – we expected it to go down as we were eating less at home, but it wouldn’t budge. We’d end up spending more money on fast food when we were over-scheduled or too busy, but that’s not a great excuse to spend $200-300 per month – I’d much rather have the money. We had to find a strategy to lower our spending and eventually settled in on a few good ideas that have helped us.
First, we figured out when we were hitting up the local fast food joints – it was mainly non-breakfast meals on the weekend (both days), and weeknights when we didn’t have a meal planned or some protein needed to be defrosted and was not or something like that. Once we identified when we were doing all this extra spending, we were working towards figuring out why were doing all that extra spending – it was simple. We didn’t plan and we didn’t make time to cook.
Get a Crock Pot
Our first step was to start taking the time to prep a few meals ahead. We noticed we were always busy (though self imposed, and we’ve been working on that too). We’ve gotten into a great routine on Sundays where we get both of our crock pots going. One crock pot has a meal for dinner that day (something like a soup) and let that cook all day. Usually if we get it in early enough we can eat it for lunch, but that doesn’t always happen. Since we have 2 crock pots, the other one gets filled with another recipe that I let cook all day and portion it out at the end of the night for lunches for the week.
Whatever is leftover from crock pot 1 also gets portioned out individually for lunches for the week. So with relatively little effort, We have 10+ servings of food for lunches for the week, as well as dinner (and sometimes lunch). This is a great and easy way to save some money and avoid eating out.
Here’s a few simple recipes for the crock pot – Barbacoa & Pulled Pork.
Set a Budget
The most important thing that we did to reduce our spending on fast food and dining out was to go all cash. My wife and I have been using credit cards for all spending (and paying them off every month, of course) but we switched to cash for this category. We set a monthly limit of $50, and at the beginning of the month I go to the ATM and get that amount of cash from our checking account and we set it on the counter. We both decide on when we will use it, and it has worked really well for us so far. We even seem to have more money left over at the end of the month from our $50! We were spending well over $150 before, and now we’ve got leftovers off of $50! So crazy!
If you aren’t sure what amount to budget, look at where you’ve been spending and set something lower than that. It needs to be low enough to make a difference and hurt a bit. Keep cash and stick to your budget and reap the savings.
Plan Your Meals
Our third breakdown was when we didn’t have a plan for what we were going to do for dinner, so we would just default to running out and picking something up quick. That’s not the cheapest option or the healthiest, so we were really working to cut that out. We’ve started planning our meals bi-weekly and have been going to the grocery store once per week to keep up on food. The planning really makes it easy as we go home and don’t have the “what’s for dinner” conversation.
How about you all? Do you plan your meals or budget your dining out expenses? Or what other tricks do you have to keep dining out spending low?
Share your experiences by commenting below!
***Photo courtesy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5930043516/
