They say you are what you eat, but if that were true, you’d be a walking stack of cash. You see, food bills are overlooked as something that we all spend way too much money on. We might decide to cut back on cinema trips or new clothes, or even reduce our plans from a week in the sun to a weekend city break. However, food never seems to cross our minds as an expense that may be getting out of hand. See this website for financial advice.
The reasons are obvious – food is awesome. Walk into any supermarket on payday and you’ll see people buying all the tastiest foods under the sun. From meats in sticky sauces to exotic rice dishes and cakes and ice creams. Visit the same supermarket again the day before payday and look at what people are buying. Frozen ready meals, reduced, on a two for one offer, that look about as appetising as eating the box it comes in. When we’ve got money, we indulge, and the thing in which we indulge the most is food. But where our waistlines go up, our bank balances come down. Let’s look at ways to spend less on your food bill.
Ditch the takeaways once per week and learn to cook something
There’s a bit of a fallacy with fresh ingredients regarding their price. It’s easy to see how this can happen, but let’s set the record straight. When we compare the cost of a takeaway to the cost of buying fresh ingredients, you may struggle to spend a similar amount of money, with the fresh ingredients costing more. But wait. The fresh ingredients will make two or three meals if proportioned correctly. Buying certain items in bulk like rice or pasta can save even more money in the long run. Learning to cook from scratch is a skill you may only have time to develop once per week or month. But when you’re cooking meals at home for a net saving compared to takeaways, AND eating healthier, you’ll soon realise the savings you can make.
Pre-prepare your lunchtime meals
Typically, you’ll hear advice about preparing meals in advance. It assumes you have all the time in the world to shop for ingredients. And spend upwards of half a day tied to the kitchen stove preparing breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks, all to be frozen for when they’re needed throughout the week. Let’s get serious. You haven’t got that kind of time. Nobody has got that kind of time (unless you really try hard to find it). Instead, focus on lunchtime meals that you can take to work. Cutting down on ‘nipping out’ at lunch and spending far too much on mid-day dining is a fast route to saving on your food bill.
Meal delivery services
If you are really stuck for time, but you know that you are spending too much money on food, meal delivery services may be the answer. You can expect to pay a little more than if you’d prepared the meals yourself. But there are certainly bulk buy savings to be had in the long run.
