Warmth and better meals some rewards of cutting our food budget

Last summer, after my husband and I did some honest budget-crunching, I revealed that we were spending an average of $800 a month on food for our family of six, with approximately $200 of that amount going toward meals out. (Some months, we discovered, we spent close to a $1,000 on food. Ouch! )

At first when we realized what we were spending, we decided to cut our food budget in half. It was a drastic move that forced us to rethink how we were using our food dollars. We started using cash and reconsidered buying many of the items we thoughtlessly threw into our cart. While I’m glad we reached a new level of consciousness, we all ended up feeling deprived—and crabby.

We realized that, while we're capable of spending half as much as we once did, we honestly didn’t want to make such a sweeping change. Instead, we decided to slowly increase the amount we were spending on food, until we arrived at a level comfortable for us. As of now, we’ve determined that we’re comfortable with spending about $500 a month on groceries.

Two notable changes have taken place since our food budget revelation. First, by shopping more carefully, we have freed up cash to help us reach one of our financial goals, which was our original motivation for changing how we shopped. That goal was to install a source of backup heat, which we were able to accomplish in early fall. We now have a small gas stove in our living room, a place where we’ve been curling up and spending lots of time together on cold winter nights.

Second, as we’ve become more aware of how we’re spending, we have become more conscious of what we’re eating. We’re eating out less and preparing more satisfying and nutritious foods at home. We’ve also cut out most prepackaged foods, including things like frozen pizza and pudding cups, and we have switched to an almost all-organic diet.

Seeing our food budget through new eyes has definitely been a learning experience. Not only have I had to learn to shop differently, but I’ve also had to sharpen my skills in the kitchen. The first time I made cooked chocolate pudding from my mother’s old recipe, it was so runny that it was more like chocolate sauce than pudding.

To be honest, it’s taken some adjusting on the part of our children, as well. We don’t buy the super-sweet 8-ounce containers of yogurt or microwave popcorn anymore. But we do enjoy plain yogurt sweetened with a little honey, and popcorn made in a kettle on our cook stove. Finding suitable substitutes for the pricier convenience foods we once ate has helped with the transition. Getting my children more involved in meal preparation has helped, too.

Having my children work alongside me does take extra time (and patience), but when they’ve made an investment in what they’re preparing, I’ve found they’re much more likely to eat it. I suppose you could say buying and preparing wholesome food is the same for me: it takes time and a little bit of patience.

Still, even while I may be devoting more time to shopping or spending a few more minutes in the kitchen, we’ve enjoyed the tangible (our new gas stove) and intangible (increased energy, improved health) rewards in a way that makes this kind of conscious spending feel like a worthy pursuit.

What’s for lunch? Small choices add up to big changes

When we found ourselves away from home last week at lunch time, we were faced with a decision. Should we dine at home on leftover baked macaroni and cheese and garlic-roasted cauliflower? Or should we eat out?

Our children were hungry and had overheard the lunch conversation my husband and I were having. They favored eating out and were shouting their opinions from the back of our van. We had fully intended to indulge our own desires (and theirs), when something made me rethink the decision.

To eat out, we would have driven past our home (and perfectly good leftovers waiting in our fridge), had to wrangle four squirmy, overtired children into a restaurant, and would have spent about $30 on a meal that we would have only marginally enjoyed. It didn’t exactly make sense to eat out when we considered all of these things.

So we went home and ate our leftovers, eating food we’d already paid for and that tasted better than the fare we might have driven out of our way to get. It seems so simple now, but making decisions about how and what to eat aren’t always so easy. In fact, food can be downright complicated.

We eat because we need food to survive, but the way we eat is influenced by many factors, including our habits, social circles, our lifestyles, our jobs, and our expectations. Once we start a pattern of behavior, it’s difficult to examine just why we do what we do. We just keep doing it because it’s what we’ve always done.

Maybe you are so accustomed to always being busy that it seems natural to order take-out or buy frozen lasagna. Perhaps you’ve never felt comfortable in the kitchen, so you feel it’s easier to buy convenience foods. If you’re single, it can be more palatable to eat out than to eat alone. If you have a large family, it can be overwhelming to come up with new meal ideas every day, so you rely on prepackaged foods instead.

Over the last several months, my husband and I have become increasingly aware of how we spend our food dollars. To break out of our own patterns of behavior, we had to acknowledge that we wanted to make a change. Then, we had to find the motivation to help make this change possible.

One particularly effective method for creating change has been to ask ourselves, “What if we did (x) instead of (x)?” For example, if you’re tired of eating lunch out but never seem to have the time or motivation to pack one, what if you spent an hour preparing make-ahead meals instead of watching television? Or what if you got out your slow cooker and tossed in the ingredients for a meal instead of scrambling to make dinner when you got home?

What do you really want? What choices could you make that will help you reach your goals? For example, if you made your lunch instead of buying it, how much money might you save? What else could you do with that money? Perhaps you want to build up your savings so you have an emergency fund, or you want to buy a new car or computer. Maybe you could take a vacation.

It might take months of choosing to pack your lunch instead of eating out to save enough money to reach your goal. But when you’re enjoying your car or relaxing on a sunny beach, will you regret those burgers you didn’t eat?

With thoughtful planning, the choices you make now (including eating leftovers) can pay off in satisfying ways in the future.

Eat well on a budget without an expensive overhaul

During a discussion with friends about meal planning, one woman declared, “We don’t eat cheap food.” I immediately bristled, then fielded a barrage of my own mental questions: What did she mean by “cheap food”? Was it packages of dehydrated noodles and boxes of macaroni and cheese? Fast food? Red beans and rice? Does my family eat what she would consider “cheap food,” I wondered?

The exchange reminded me that what we eat can often be as much a social issue as a personal one. In essence, my friend’s statement drew a metaphorical line: cheap food is bad; expensive food is good. When I found myself on the side of “cheap,” (we enjoy boxed macaroni and cheese and eat fast food on occasion) I realized it’s easy to end up feeling excluded when you aren’t eating the “right” foods.

It’s true that there are many so-called cheap foods with little nutritional value, but I balk at the idea that there is a point of perfection, a food utopia, when it comes to eating. I also vehemently challenge the notion that you have to spend a lot to eat well. Instead of striving for perfection in your eating habits, it’s much wiser, and more productive, to focus on making progress.

If you’re like me, “eating well” means striking a good balance. I shop for nutritious foods my family likes and that fit into our budget, and l look for ways to integrate more organic foods into our diet. However, it can be difficult to know how to find this balance, particularly when you consider that organics typically cost more and can sometimes be more difficult to access. But eating well doesn’t mean you need to push for a complete – and expensive – organic overhaul. You can start small and make a few significant changes.

These changes can start with the help of two key shopping lists. To help consumers prioritize which organic foods they should focus on buying, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has a published list of foods proven to retain the most residual pesticides. These foods, commonly known as the Dirty Dozen, include seven fruits: peaches, apples, strawberries, blueberries, nectarines, cherries, and imported grapes. Five vegetables round out the Dirty Dozen list: sweet bell peppers, celery, spinach, kale/collard greens, and potatoes.


The EWG has another, perhaps more practical, shopping list known as the Clean 15. As the name suggests, the Clean 15 is a list of 15 foods known to have little to no pesticide contamination. The list includes foods such as avocados, onions, sweet peas, sweet potatoes, watermelon, grapefruit, and cantaloupe.

With these two lists, you can look for produce that fits your budget, while considering which foods you may be willing to spend more on. You might find, as I did, that there are organic produce choices that cost the same or less as the non-organic variety. Last week, I bought a pound of organic Bartlett pears for $1.99 a pound; the non-organic variety was the same price. I also bought a bunch of organic grapes for the same price as the conventional ones. I did spend slightly more to buy organic Fuji apples ($2.19 a pound, compared to $1.59), but they were literally the best apples I can recall having ever eaten.

For me, those tasty apples – a food that is delicious, good for me and won’t break my budget – is how I define eating well. Next week, I’ll share how this definition of eating well has changed the way I shop and cook for my family.

Feeling deprived isn’t part of our budget plan

I’m surprised by my naiveté. When I declared that we were taking a serious look at our food budget and attempting to cut it in half, I thought the decision was largely a dollars-and-cents issue. We reasoned that we’re spending more than we wanted, so we just needed to cut back.
The situation is far more complicated than I first thought. In the last few days before I went shopping again, breakfast was utter chaos. Our three oldest children were so frustrated that we had run out of our customary breakfast fare that they were all crying. Honestly, I felt out of sorts too, grumbling to myself when I was out of coffee and half and half, and feeling crabby when I had to field questions about what we were having for dinner.
I didn’t realize how much we depend on the familiarity and convenience of certain foods. When we ran out of yogurt and didn’t have the kind of cheese we like, for example, we felt deprived. Those feelings of deprivation mean that the pendulum of our food budget adjustments has swung too far the other way.
While we don’t want to spend thoughtlessly on food, we don’t want to be slaves to our budget, either. We want to be as intentional with our food dollars as we are with other parts of our budget. We still want to shop and eat in ways that leave us feeling happy and nourished.
As my husband and I discussed our budget for the coming month, we talked about the parts of our plan we need to revise. But our cost-cutting food plan also has benefits that we like. First, we both agreed that we were glad we raised our budget consciousness and learned that it’s possible to scale back what we spend. Now, we can adjust our food budget so we have more freedom to buy what we enjoy, but not so much flexibility that we return to our old ways. For now, we’re increasing our bi-weekly budget from $150 to $200.
Second, we want to continue using the cash-only approach to eating out. Having a specific parameter in place makes meals out an event we can look forward to, not just a budget-gobbling habit. Though we blew our eating out budget the first week, we stuck to our plan and spent only what we had set aside. When we went out to eat at the start of another two weeks, the opportunity excited us.
Third, we both appreciated how some upfront meal preparation paid off over the following two weeks. I bought hamburger in bulk (at a phenomenal price) and made spaghetti sauce, meatballs, sloppy joes, and taco meat all at the same time. I froze the meals in family-size portions, so we could pull out what we needed the night before and spend just a few minutes boiling noodles, grating cheese, or making a quick side dish to get dinner on the table.
Finally, we want to revisit our list of goals – such as buying a woodstove – that prompted us to trim our food budget, and we’ll create a more specific plan to accomplish them. If we’re going to continue making changes in the way we spend our food dollars, we need to see tangible benefits. Right now, we’ll take the money we’re saving and transfer it into an account we’ve earmarked for our goals.
Even with a few bumps along the way, budgeting can work. We’ll keep adjusting our budget until we find a balance that lets us save money while shopping wisely and eating well.

Lower food bills can move us closer to debt-free lifestyle

I wish I could say that after all these years of writing about money, I’ve reached some sort of financial nirvana, a place where our budget effortlessly hums along. In truth, we hit budget bumps and have starts and stops every month like everyone else. Nevertheless, even if it were possible to find perfection, that isn’t the point of a budget.

A budget isn’t a static template that we lay over our lives; it’s a spending guide that flexes with our family. For us, one of the most exciting things about a budget is that it constantly offers us opportunities to see our finances with fresh eyes. When we see where we’re spending, we can shift our priorities.

It turns out that we’re getting ready for a major shift in our family budget. When we recently calculated our total monthly food expenses, we faced a sobering truth. In June, we spent over a $1,000 on food for our family of six, and in the five months prior to that, we averaged over $800 on groceries and eating out. We know we can do better. We want to do better.

We’ve challenged ourselves to cut our food budget in half, not as a way to be stingy, but because we want to stretch our money. We’re looking for creative ways to get the things we want and need with the money we have. Ultimately, our goal is to be entirely debt free, so we plan to take half of what we save on food costs and apply it to the principle balance on our mortgage. We’ll devote the other half to projects for our family. We want some fun things, including a family trip and a playhouse for our children. Some practical items, such as a new vacuum and a woodstove, also are on our list.

Cutting our food budget in half may sound like a daunting task. How will this even be possible in a family of growing children who are voracious eaters? We’ll start with what we spend on eating out, which averages over $200 a month. By packing snacks and lunches instead of heading for the nearest fast food restaurant, we’ll whittle down what we spend on eating out to $100, which we plan to take out in cash and keep in an envelope. When the cash is gone, there’s no more eating out that month.

We’ll use the same all-cash approach with grocery shopping, because I know how easy it is to spend more than I’ve planned. Case in point, when I stopped at the grocery store with four items on my list for a camping trip, I walked out with 10 and spent three times as much as I had planned. With cash, that won’t happen.

We’ll also have to carve out more time for food preparation and change the way we do some of our shopping. This means rethinking items we mindlessly put in our cart, including pudding cups and granola bars. Juice won’t be a morning mainstay, but will become an occasional treat. Even pantry staples like egg noodles (Here is the Cowgirl's Country Life blog where she has a great recipe for Chicken and (Egg) Noodles) that seem inexpensive will be foods I buy the ingredients for and prepare at home - for a fraction of the grocery store price. We’ll keep trying different strategies until we find budget-stretching ideas that truly work for us.

I’ll be sharing my journey to reduce my food bill with you in future posts. And I encourage you to share your best cost-cutting ideas with me. E-mail me at cdenman@acce-online.com or leave comments below. Adventures in frugal living are more fun when we experience them together.

Your eating habits may be keeping you from reaching your goals

Last week, faced with a slightly unappealing piece of homemade lasagna I had packed for lunch, I accepted an invitation to go to lunch with two of my co-workers. We settled on fast food, where I ordered a chicken sandwich, a side salad, and hot fudge sundae, spending $3.21. I silently congratulated myself on my frugality. Of course, given that I had lunch in the refrigerator at the office, I wasn’t being frugal at all.

While we sat in our corner booth, both my co-workers mentioned that they wanted to eat out less. One commented about the power of the up-sell; he’d planned to buy a snack and spend less than $3. Instead, he bought a meal and an iced coffee and spent nearly twice as much as he had intended. The other ordered a $5 salad.

This lunch scenario reflects how complicated our decisions about food can be. According to Cornell University professor Dr. Brian Wansink, we make approximately 220 decisions about food every day. That’s a lot of decisions, most of which probably seem small, but together, they can have a significant financial impact. Sure, my lunch only cost about $3, but it was money I hadn’t planned on spending. I also threw away the lasagna and accidently left the chocolate bar I had packed melting in my car, which just upped the ante on my supposed $3 lunch.

Nationally, American households spent an average of $7,514 on food last year--$2,736 of this amount went to eating out. Do you know how much you spent last year on food? If not, you should, particularly when you consider that your eating habits could be keeping you from building an emergency fund, saving for a down payment on a house, taking a vacation, funding your retirement, or reaching your other personal financial goals.

This doesn’t mean you need to stock up on 10-cents-a-package instant soup or stop eating out, but you might consider ways to become more intentional with your food budget. What could you do with the money you’d save by eating out half as much? How much money would you save if you prepared and froze meals ahead of time instead of hitting the grocery store several times a week? What if you bought an inexpensive French press and brewed your own coffee at home or the office? Small changes can add up to a significant amount of savings.

Consider a homemade breakfast burrito. At first, a $2 burrito at a fast food restaurant seems inexpensive. However, I made my own sausage and egg burritos at home for 98 cents each, including tax. Without the sausage, the cost drops to 68 cents—plus, I have more control over what I’m putting into my food. I used all-natural sausage and farm fresh eggs I purchased from my niece. Even when I paid a premium for these ingredients ($3.69 and $2 respectively), the total cost of each burrito was half what it would have cost at a restaurant.

When I add a glass of not-from-concentrate orange juice (42 cents per serving), my total at-home cost increases to $1.40. By comparison, a small orange juice costs $1.59 at a fast food restaurant, bringing the total amount spent for a burrito and drink to $3.59, plus tax. If I ate a homemade breakfast burrito three days a week, instead of eating out, I’d save about $30 a month, or $360 a year.

What could you or I do with $360 a year besides order fast food? That question surely will inspire me to think more carefully about how I spend my food budget.