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Cooking Poor
Frugal cooking can be an intimidating concept. It’s easy to turn a meal into a huge expense, but it’s not that hard to trim your grocery budget without sacrificing variety and flavor. It just takes some planning and a few money-saving techniques. We usually feed our family of five, often with guests, for about $100 per week.
Schedule your meals. Find or make a weekly meal planner. I recommend this or this. Cross out the meals you don’t need to worry about due to your schedule that week. If you won’t be home, you don’t have to cook that meal. Fill in the meals in the remaining slots. Keep your schedule in mind. If you get home from work at 5:30 and have to be somewhere by 6:30, dinner needs to be something quick. Also, make sure you include every side dish you will be serving. Now, look at the recipe for each dish in every meal. Write down everything you need to make all of the food you plan to eat that week. While planning your meals, think about how to use your leftovers. If you cook chicken breasts one day, the leftovers can be chicken nuggets the next.
Take inventory. Take your meal plan and a pen while you look through all of your cabinets and your refrigerator. Why buy what you already have? If you already have steaks in the freezer, don’t waste your money buying more. If you have it, cross it off of your meal plan shopping list. Whatever is left is your shopping list. Review it. Is there anything that can be combined or eliminated? Is there a key ingredient for a sauce that’s missing?
Don’t forget the staples. If flour or sugar is on sale, stock up. Anything you use on a regular basis is a staple, buy it when it’s cheap.
Build a shopping list from your meal plan. When you are in the store, stick to your list. It’s hard, but avoid impulse purchases at all costs. Don’t shop hungry, don’t buy things just because they are on sale, and don’t dawdle. Get what you need and get out.
Avoid pre-processed food. We slice and shred our own cheese. Buying the pre-shredded cheese costs an extra $5 and saves just 5 minutes. Don’t buy pre-sliced apples or anything that will only save a few minutes for several dollars of cost.
Every couple of weeks, I cook a large pot of either beans or rice and keep it in the refrigerator. Almost every meal that we cook gets a cup or two of beans or rice added to it. It doesn’t alter the flavor much, but it adds a few extra servings for pennies. It’s a healthy way to stretch any meal on the cheap.
We have a large bowl in the refrigerator filled with mixed greens. We buy whatever salad-like greens are on sale and prepare the large salad all at once. Most meals start with a salad, which makes it easier to fill up without relying on the protein dish, which is generally the most expensive part of a meal. As a dedicated meat-eater, it took some getting used to, but it’s a good meal–cheap and healthy.
Cook enough for at least 3 meals. That will eliminate 2/3 of the work involved in cooking. Plan ahead to make your meals simple and easy.
Freeze the leftovers in usable sizes. Stock up on semi-disposable meal-sized containers. Freeze some in single-serving sizes for work, and others in family-size servings for last minute meals at home. Preparing for last minute meals keeps you from serving garbage or takeout when life gets in the way of your plans.
Avoid wasting leftovers. Wasted food is wasted money.
When you are done cooking meat, take any drippings or scraps and throw them into the slow-cooker along with any vegetable scraps laying around. Cook it overnight, then strain it into an ice cube tray. You now have stock/broth ready to be added to any recipe.
Plan for serial meals. Chicken breast leftover from today’s meal can become chicken nuggets tomorrow, to be shredded into chicken salad the next day.
When there isn’t enough left for a full serving, we put the remains in a resealable bag in the freezer. When we accumulate enough to fill our slow-cooker, we dump in all of the bags with a couple cups of water. I look through the refrigerator for any leftovers that have been overlooked that week or any vegetables getting close to being too old. It all gets cut up and added to the cooker to cook on low all day. I rarely add seasoning because everything going in the pot tastes good. We never get the same meal twice and our “free soup” is never bland.
That’s how we cook cheap, without sacrificing too much time. How do you save money cooking?
This post is a blast from the past. Originally posted here in January 2010.
5 Reasons to Quit Saving and Start Living
- Image by owaief89 via Flickr
Life is all about trade-offs. You trade your time for a paycheck. Your trade your paycheck for food, rent, and security. Don’t get so obsessed with saving and security that you forget to live your life. There are many good reasons to put your savings on hold in order to really live. Here are five of them:
1. You have an adequate emergency fund. You will never hear me advise against an emergency fund. If you don’t have one, stop reading this and get one. Go. Without an emergency fund, your budget is a financial crisis waiting to happen. With an emergency fund, you can weather life’s speed-bumps without watching them become total train-wrecks.
2. Your retirement is on autopilot. You are not allowed to stop saving and investing for retirement. Ever. Assuming you have a traditionally scheduled career that involves you working until you hit 65 and deferring a huge chunk of living until then, your income will cease when you retire. Do you know how long you will live? Do you want to spend your retirement broke and bored? Are you relying on the responsible financial management of the federal government to make sure you will still get your Social Security? Invest in your retirement and get this investment on autopilot so you can stop worrying about it.
3. Your income is set. I don’t believe in the fairy tale of a company being loyal to its employees. The aren’t. However, if you have a stable-ish job, an in-demand career, and some side-income coming from alternate sources, your emergency fund can be enough to carry you through the low times. That’s what it’s there for.
4. You have dreams. If you’ve always wanted to travel the world, follow a band on your, volunteer extensively, or anything else, it’s time to do it. Don’t postpone your passion.
5. Deathbed regrets suck. Very few people lie on their deathbed lamenting the things they did. Regrets tend to be focused on opportunities missed, skipped, or indefinitely postponed. Do the things that are important to you before it’s too late to do them. Don’t abandon your future in favor of current pleasures, but don’t forget to live, now.
Do you have any other reasons to stop saving?
The 10-Step Saving Action Plan
- Image via Wikipedia
Getting started saving money is hard. It’s easy to get used to instant gratification and impulse purchases. Postponing material fulfillment takes discipline and deferred enjoyment. I don’t like deferring my enjoyment, but I do it. The path to successful savings isn’t always easy, but it is gratifying, when you give it the time and effort required to see actual results.
Here’s the 10 step plan to successful savings:
- Recognize the need. If you don’t understand why you need to save, you won’t do it for long. If you think it’s more important to buy a new car, a new TV, or the fanciest portable gadget out there, you won’t prioritize saving. You need to think about how saving a solid nest egg will benefit you and your future self, before you can be sure you will stick to your savings plan.
- Pay yourself first. When you get paid, whether it’s a traditional paycheck or a surprise windfall, immediately drop 10-15% in a savings account you keep completely off-limits, no exceptions. If you make this an unbreakable habit, you will have a surprising amount of money in a surprisingly short amount of time.
- Prioritize. Prioritize your expenses. If you don’t care about a particular optional expense, get rid of it! Examine the rest of the bill for things you can trim. Do you really need 5000 channels? Can you make do with just 300 specialized versions of ESPN?
- Compare prices. If you buy from the lower-priced store, you save money. No s****, huh? Doing this requires that you forgo impulse purchases and do some research before you buy most things. Shop online, at least enough to know what you should be paying.
- Save your change. When you get home at night, put your change in a jar. When the jar gets full, bring it to the bank. A medium-sized mason jar full of silver-colored coins will bring in about $100. Put that directly into savings.
- Save your dollars. I pay cash for everything I buy in person. When my money clip gets too many one-dollar bills, I put them all into a box. This would be a phenomenal addition to my savings account, if I weren’t planning to use it for spending money on our vacation next month.
- Save the extra $$. If you get unexpected money, don’t let it enter you regular cash flow. Get it straight into a savings account. You weren’t expecting it, so you won’t miss it.
- Save the new $$. Save your raise. If you start making more money, save the difference. Like #7, you’ll never miss it. Don’t give yourself a chance to expand your lifestyle.
- Club the naysayers in the knees. There will always be people who denigrate your choices. If they tell you it’s crazy to live within your means, or get upset because you don’t want to go to the fancy restaurant, screw ’em. Not literally of course. We’re trying to apply a punishment here, after all. If they don’t like your choice, kick them in the shins.
- Reward yourself. Don’t be afraid to schedule rewards at certain savings goalposts. When you get $5000 saved, let yourself take $300 to the high-end steakhouse. When you get $10000, look at buying the camera you want. Give yourself a reason to stay motivated. It is, after all, your money.
This is how we’ve managed to build up a small-but-comfortable emergency fund and tackle a nice chunk of our debt. Do you have plan to save?
I Smell a Scam
I hate scammers. Whether it’s the garage-sale shoplifter, telemarketing “charities” with 99% overhead, 3-card-monte
dealers, or the guy who begs Grandma for cash every week, they all need to be strung up. Since vigilante justice is generally illegal and occasionally immoral, it’s best to just avoid the problems from the start. Here are some scams to watch out for.
Pyramid Scams – All of the little parties people throw to earn free items at the expense of their friends are pyramid schemes. Most of those are legitimate money-sinks. A few, however, exist solely to get their “consultants” to bring in more consultants. The sales aren’t the actual way to make money. If you don’t have anyone “downstream” you won’t make any money. If the focus isn’t on selling an actual product or service, but is instead on bringing in people under you, you have entered the world of pyramid scams. Generally illegal and always immoral. Don’t sign up and, if you do, don’t ask me to participate.
Advance Fees and Expensive Prizes – If you win a contest and you are expected to send money to claim your prize, it is a scam. You don’t have to pay sales tax in advance. You don’t have to pay transfer fees. Real prizes are delivered free, accompanied by a 1099, because prizes are income. No prize requires pre-payment. No loan service requires “finder’s fees”. If it doesn’t sound right, don’t pay it and certainly don’t give your bank information to anyone you can’t verify.
Work at Home – The most common work-at-home job I’ve found is stuffing envelopes. You see the signs on telephone poles all over the city. “Make $10/hour stuffing envelopes from the comfort of your own home! Just send $50 to….” When you get the instructions, you are told to hand up signs telling people to send you $50 for instructions on how to make $10/hour stuffing envelopes. Everybody is feeding off of everybody else.
Charity – Never give money to a charity over the phone. Always take the time to verify where you are sending your money. Some freak may call to tug on your heartstrings with a sob story, but you don’t have to give them money. At least ask them to send it in writing so you can do some checking, first.
Phishing – Simply put, don’t click on any link in any email, unless you know where it is going. If it is a link to a financial institution, go enter the address into the address bar yourself. If you find yourself on a site you don’t recognize, don’t give them your personal information and don’t ever reuse your usernames and passwords. If you do, one bad site could get access to everything you do online.
[ad name=”inlineleft”]Foreign Lottery – To be clear, Spain did not just hold a international lottery and randomly draw your email address. No lottery in the world works that way. If you didn’t enter the lottery while you were in Spain, you aren’t going to win it. The scam is that you need to provide your bank information, including a number of release forms so the scammers can transfer money to you. In reality, you are signing over control of your account and will be wiped out.
Nigerian/419 Emails – Ex-Prince WhateverHisNameIs wants your help to get his fortune out of WhereverHeIsFrom. The New Widow Ima F. Raud has an inheritence that she won’t live long enough to spend. They’ve both been given your name as a trustworthy person to handle the transactions in exchange for a mere $10 million. What friends do you have that would make this seem legitimate? Once again, they will get your bank information and take your money. At a minimum, they will try to get you to pay a few thousand dollars for “Transfer fees”. Don’t do it.
Overpayment by Wire – I had this one attempted on my last week. You sell something online. A potential buyer agrees to purchase the item, sight-unseen. They’ll send a cashier’s check and, after it clears, one of their agents will pick it up. Unfortunately, the buyer’s secretary screwed up and added a zero to the check. Would you mind wiring the overpayment back, minus a small fee for the hassle? The check is bogus and there is no way to verify it. You’ll deposit the check and it will be assumed to be real. The bank will make the funds available well before it comes back as fraud. You’ll see the available funds and send the money by non-refundable Western Union and some thug in Nigeria gets a new iPhone.
Foreclosure Scams – Some scammers try to prey on the vulnerable because they are, well, vulnerable. If you are facing foreclosure, be very careful about where you turn for help. One scam is to get you to sign over your home “temporarily” to clear the title. That doesn’t work, but you won’t find that out until you are handed an eviction notice and told you still owe the money.
Stranded Friends – You get an email from a friend saying he’s in London/Moscow/Sydney/Wherever, and he’s been mugged. He’s got nothing and needs $2500 to get home. Can you help? Do you really have friends close enough to ask for a $2500 international bailout, but not so close they tell you about the vacation ahead of time? Would they really be too timid to call you collect instead of begging for change to use an internet cafe?
Megan Fox’s Little One: The First Year Costs of Having a Baby
If you can’t get enough of Megan Fox like everybody else, you probably already know that paparazzi has spotted her with a new and conspicuous belly bump. The steamy star already gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Noah in 2012, but she also expressed a desire to have more children in the future. We just didn’t think that it would happen this soon. Luckily, Megan is blessed with celebrity wealth, so funding another newborn shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Unfortunately, most new mothers aren’t celebs. If you are a new or expecting mother, prepare yourself for your bundle of joy by familiarizing yourself with first year expenses and ways to save money.
What are the first year costs of caring for a baby?
Babies are expensive. How expensive, you ask? Well, that depends on your standard of living. It’s a pretty good bet that Megan Fox will dish out more dough on her newborn than most people have the ability to. Baby Gucci just isn’t on the shopping list for mothers who live from paycheck to paycheck. However, the essentials are already expensive enough to make most moms have a panic attack. A 2010 USDA report suggests that a typical American family spends about $12,000 during the first year on a baby. These days, that number is probably closer to $15,000.
What will most of the money go towards?
There are two major items that are an absolute must for a baby: formula/baby food and diapers. Expect to shell out about $50 per week on these things alone. That’s nearly $2,500 per year. Another big portion of your baby expenses will comprise of pricier one-time purchases including a baby stroller, crib, car seat, etc. The rest of the funds will likely go to baby clothes, childcare, and medical expenses.
How can I save money?
There are countless ways to cut the costs of having a baby, but you need to get creative to maximize your savings. If you want to have a fatter wallet at the end of that first year, here are some of the easiest and most effective ways to do so.
Take free samples during the initial hospital stay
Many baby product manufacturers supply maternity wards with free samples, but nurses sometimes forget to hand them out. Remember to ask about these samples after giving birth, and bring home as much as they will allow. You can snag useful items like: diapers, diaper bags, baby lotion, swaddling cloths, disposable bottle nipples, alcohol swabs, a thermometer, a nasal aspirator and more.
Breastfeed
A mother’s milk is the healthiest food option for a growing baby because it contains nutrients not found in many baby formulas. Since formula can be very expensive, you will save a ton of money and give your child the best nutrition possible by breastfeeding.
Get oversized baby clothes or use hand-me-downs
Babies grow at an amazingly fast rate, so always buy clothes of a bigger size. If you have close friends or family members who’ve already had a child, ask if you can use their old baby clothes.
Buy diapers, formula, and other commonly used supplies in bulk
Like with most consumer goods, you will pay less if you buy more. Stock up on the essentials early on if you don’t want to waste your money in the long run.
