My 31 Day Financial Challenge- Day 20: Evaluating Your Expenses – Food

I have spent a great deal of time looking for ways to save money on our food bill. Mostly because it is one of the few expenses I have any real control over. While I found Trent’s tips helpful, they were mostly things I had thought of before.

Obviously cooking at home is cheaper than eating out. But in our case, we have cut that from our budget almost completely. But, he did make an important point about having homemade alternatives for fast food. I freeze meals like soups or stews in family meal size portions. Then on a busy night I defrost one for dinner. We’ve also discovered that packing lunches and snacks for car trips saves paying for high priced fast food on the road. Getting fast food used to be one of our treats for road trips, but I’d rather put the money toward a real dinner date at another time.

I definitely agree with Trent that you can teach yourself to cook. I’ve even been able to learn to bake bread. I make frequent use of my crock pot too. I even discovered a website http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/ devoted to using a slow cooker almost exclusively. This saves a lot of time and effort right around the dinner hour, which tends to be a busy time of day for us.

I do question buying a deep freezer. If you do have one already, by all means make use of it. But deep freezers are notorious energy hogs (unless you purchase a new energy star variety). I’d have to run the numbers to figure out whether we would actually save enough money buying in such large bulk purchases that the savings wouldn’t get eaten up in utility bills. As of now, we still buy in bulk, just not giant bulk or too many kinds of items in bulk at once, and we manage to fit it all into our standard refrigerator freezer.

I didn’t expect Trent to cover all of the potential ways to save money on your grocery bill. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of ways. Sometimes it is as simple of looking over your grocery bill and cutting down on luxury food items. Eating less is almost always healthier, considering the high rate of obesity in America today. Junk food is expensive. We don’t often splurge on things like chips, candy and cookies. If we want cookies I make them at home from scratch. Otherwise we don’t eat them at all.  That way I can focus the money we have to spend on necessary foods that taste good and are good for us.