I was kind of shocked/thrilled this morning when I reviewed my family's recent bank statements and saw that our revamping of our meal planning (well, creation of a meal plan instead of nothing) is saving us $400 a month. We did some pretty basic things, the main one being creating a spreadsheet of recipes that are 1) inexpensive, 2) have a cheap high-calorie ingredient (I'm skinny and need ~2,200/day to maintain weight, so I'd tend to overspend on hearty food), and 3) are large enough for leftovers.
I point this out because of one big budgeting surprise we had. We thought we were overspending because of eating out a lot. Instead, it was because bad meal planning meant we were wasting a ton of the food that we bought at the grocery store or not paying attention to cheaper alternatives for meals or individual ingredients. Better grocery store buying habits accounted for $300 of the $400 saved.
The other unexpectedly simple step was to print out the recipes we liked instead of just, say, bookmarking them online. It's made it so easy to just take out our recipe folder and one person pulls out, like, eight recipes that sound good, then the other person narrows it down to four, and you're done.
September 28, 2017 at 09:18AM
