I’ve always been a big fan of home cooked meals. For me, it’s about having family around enjoying each other’s company while whipping something up in the kitchen over going to a restaurant. I did this often growing up with friends, and now that a few of us have kids in the mix, this is especially true! But even though I prefer to eat at home, for many years of my life, we seemed never to have the time or a plan to cook at home so we’d usually find ourselves at a restaurant at least 2 to 4 times a week.
For some people, going out to eat a couple times a week at a restaurant is the ideal situation. You can see an abundance of options and can choose whichever appetizer or entree you’re in the mood for that day, not to mention also having your choice of a freshly squeezed lemonade or draft beer. We lived this life quite a bit, nothing wrong with that, but those checks throughout the month add up quick! 🙂
Our family got to a point where we knew we wanted to eat at home more often and we wanted to eat a little more healthy and balanced but again it felt like we didn’t have the time to plan and appropriately grocery shop. And then we came across HomeChef in July of 2016.
HomeChef is a meal kit subscription company that ships a few pre-portioned meals to your doorstep each week. We would pick the number and the type of meals we wanted for the week on an app and then they would show up ready to be cooked. This worked out great for us!
We committed to finding the time to cook at home about three nights a week, and it was easier because we didn’t need to plan our primary meals at night and we got to shop for fewer meals at the grocery store. We did this for just over a year until September of 2017, then we realized the only issue with this plan; the price!
Even though it seemed reasonable at the time while we were in the thick of the subscription life, consistently spending $20 per dinner is a lot of money! It seemed to be even more expensive when there were no leftovers for lunch the next day. So not only were we spending $10 per person per meal for dinner, I was probably spending at least $10 per meal a few days a week for lunch, as well!
One nice thing about HomeChef though was that it included a recipe card with each meal we ordered. I want to say we refer to our recipes more often, but it’s a work in progress. Although I wouldn’t recommend a meal subscription service for the long term, another positive take away was it did get us to find the time to cook at home, or at least we thought. When we ended our subscription to HomeChef in 2017, we didn’t backfill a process for planning out our meals, going to the store, and cooking.
Over time, we slowly started seeing ourselves going out to restaurants more often. The holidays came, I got a new job, and then all of a sudden 2018 was rocking and rolling. Just a couple of months ago, our average week consisted of eating out again at least 2 or 4 nights a week while we were sometimes averaging as much as $600-$700 a month on eating out!
Recently, after really diving into the concepts of financial independence and truly understanding what we were doing and now being more intentional about knowing where we were spending our money, we’ve been making delicious home-cooked dinners that are large enough to have lunch the next day! It’s so simple and super cost efficient!
But the point is this whole idea is made possible by changing our mindset just a little bit. Thinking about the situation a little differently and not allowing the slight inconvenience of planning get in the way of us doing what we ultimately want to do and which is spend time together, eat a little healthier and not break the bank on food.
With a little more intentionality and planning, we were able to effectively cut our food bill in half from about $1,000 all in a month to about $500. This number includes groceries, restaurants, lunch at school/work (my new job has a kitchen…and beer :)), snacks at the gas station, coffee shops, all that. We cook batch meals a lot more often and with help of a few apps listed below we have been able to crush the food game.
For most people, food is in their top 3 or 4 monthly expenses, others being housing, car payments and child care. What are you doing to reel in this monthly cost?
I downloaded these three free apps to help with home cooking:
1 — OrganizEat – this app lets you store recipes that you find online or have on hand with a photo. So clutch for remembering awesome meals you whipped up a few months back!
2 – Mealime – pick your meals on this app and it creates the shopping list for you! Boom! I can’t tell you how many times I used to forget something from the store!
…and this last one is probably my favorite…
3 – Pantry Check – how many times do you come home from the grocery store, open the pantry and what you have in your hand is staring right back at you on the shelf?! haha. this app allows you to keep an inventory of what you have in the kitchen so you know if you already have a pack of shredded cheese! 🙂
Excellent Jup! I can tell you for a fact that I was a victim of the laziness as well, but all that has changed over the last year due to planning that makes sense. The girlfriend and I enjoy cooking together (who doesn’t?!), however, I work two jobs and she is in Med School. We used brainpower (mostly hers) to effectively devise a plan in order to cutback on spending at restaurants. How did we do this? Well, we looked at our week and decided that Sunday night date night will now be cooking for the week. No, not meal prepping, but actually cooking for the week. I’ll explain with an example. We will usually start with a few pieces of organic chicken and salmon. We will then pressure cook black beans and a pound of rice, separately of course 😉 Next, and this is where you can add some serious flavors and choices, we will make pico de gallo, sliced avocados, or a salald. These options will present different options for our chicken and fish. Why? this prevents falling into meal prepping. Options, Options, Options everywhere. The savings you ask? Roughly, we cut about $300-500/month. These savings are now used for future goals that we have in mind. We have also played the mystery basket cooking game from “Chopped” to spice things up! We keep it fun and loose in the kitchen. This has brought us together more and created steps to FI!
Love that, Sean! That just pumped me up!