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My apologies if this is the most obvious “frugal living” post ever, but here goes:
My wife and I cook 95% of our meals at home–breakfast, lunch and dinner–and have consistently planned our weekly menu since we first set up housekeeping together. Usually, we sit down after breakfast on shopping day, agree on what we want to eat the next week based on our mood, the weather, what we’ve already got on hand, and write out the menu. We don’t assign meals to specific days; we usually just eat the most perishable stuff first.
Then we take inventory and we figure out what ingredients we’ll need to buy and write the shopping list on the same sheet with the menu. Then we go shopping and buy the list, and usually not much more.
We don’t always stick to the menu; sometimes we make different meals, but with the same ingredients. Sometimes (rarely) we eat out.
Doing this keeps our average cost per meal per person to about $1, and food waste on the order of 1%, while eating great meals (this is about shopping discipline, not culinary deprivation, although portion-control is another benefit of home cooking).
I’m sure most frugal folks reading this are sore from yawning, but most people we observe when we’re out shopping don’t seem to practice this kind thing, and the statistics on US food waste suggest it too.
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We plan our meals extensively. We have a whiteboard on the side of our Fridge with 2 weeks of meals outlined.
Our shopping trips are usually a combination of perishables we need (milk, bread, etc) and what is on deep sales. We bring all the local sales flyers to one store as all stores in our area price-match advertised pricing on most brand-name products.
Our planning is $1 or less for breakfast and lunch. Dinner is usually a cycle of one decent meal (a $5 steak we share) and a cheapo meal the next night (about $2 per person).
Summer our produce budget goes down as we grow our own vegetables in a few 2′ x 8′ x 2′ tall cedar planters I made, and we have plenty of neighbors dumping excess produce on us.
We also invested recently in a chest freezer to allow us to store more meat when it is on extreme sales or clearance (we stock up on meat that is on it’s best before date for a discount), and this year we can freeze some of our excess veggies.
We do allow for a treat on the weekend (usually a dessert or a bag of chips) and the odd case of beer or bottle of wine.
I would say we have learned over the years to be frugal – we use to be the types that would go to the one upscale store in town, buy what we want, and waste food since it would perish because of bad planning.
I had a few financial butt kickings in my early 20’s out of school (job loss, debt, and financial insecurity) that were real life lessons. Glad I went through that hardship then to put me on the right track for the rest of my life.
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Inglewood, I hear you on the financial butt kickings–they do have a way of concentrating the mind.
I have to say, though, I’m sceptical about the economics of freezers. I know a lot of folks use them and I can see if you’re getting venison or other foods in bulk for super cheap, that you’ve got to store it somewhere. But for discounted grocery store meats, at the prices I’m able to get at my urban Kroger, I feel confident the cost of operating the freezer would exceed the savings.
If the freezer’s in your conditioned living space, you do recover some of the cost by helping the furnace during heating season, but in summer, if the freezer’s in an air-conditioned space, you pay more than double with the A/C having to remove the freezer’s waste heat. Ideally, you’d want to the freezer on a screened porch in summer and inside in the kitchen in winter. Oh, and if you make a habit of thawing foods in your fridge, you recover the original energy required to freeze the item by reducing the refrigerator’s work load.
I’m a recovering HVAC engineer, but I admit I haven’t done calculations on freezer economics, so I’m just SWAGing, but I’d love to hear folks’ analyses of their freezer econ.
I find, too, that the rate that our Kroger marks down overstock exceeds our rate of consumption, so as long as I keep on the lookout, I can stay ahead of the curve. But I envy the folks who have super discount stores like the Sharp Shopper that J&R talk about–I’ve yet to find anything like that in the ATL. If anyone knows of such a place, (ITP preferably) I’d love to know!
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@Luntmentsh – Freezers, argh! I swear the new ones are made very badly. Our 10 year old upright Frigidaire freezer recently went belly-up (in the basement) and we didn’t notice until the smell was… I figure we lost about $1000 worth of food. And the freezer was $900 to begin with so maybe you’re right about it not being worth it. We had been buying whole local organic grass-fed beeves so it made sense then, but we might not bother anymore. Funnily enough, the freezer has an “alarm” on it that didn’t alarm us at all since it still thought the inside was 0 degrees. POS!
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Bummer. I hadn’t even considered the catastrophic failure scenario. I think most of the compressors in fridges, freezers, and dehumidifiers these days are Chinese junk, even in American name brand equipment like Frigidaire, Kenmore, etc. They cost less up front, but don’t have the longevity.
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Yes, we just had a repair man come out ($85) for a diagnosis and he said we might as well buy a new one because repair could be anywhere from $300 to $600+. So I guess this freezer will end up in a landfill. ARGH!
We’re going to take out the shelves and use them elsewhere or maybe sell them, but can’t really part out much else since we don’t know what’s wrong with it. What a waste.
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Were you able to get a sense of how much the freezer was adding to your electric bill?
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I did the math on my freezer – it adds about $3.70 Canadian (just under $3 US) to my electrical bill a month.
Where I live, we have different rates for the time of day that are standardized, and all appliances have to show how much energy they use on average. The government even has a website to get the $ cost of running any appliance. The government also sent out meters to every home to put on any appliance/etc. to measure how much electricity they use.
For me, the cost makes sense as I live in a rural location, the nearest “cheap” supermarket is 30 minutes away – so it does save me time/trips and I can stock up when food is cheap as my refrigerator freezer only holds a bit of food.
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@Inglewood – it’s good to know that you have food on hand in case of emergencies, power outages, layoffs, etc.
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Inglewood–$3 is amazing. I’d have though it’d be more in the $10-$20 range. Shows what I know.
And the more I thought about it, I realized that a larger family would almost have to have a dedicated freezer, given that my wife and I keep our refrigerator’s freezer maxed out most of the time with leftovers, bread loaves, scavenged fruit, nuts, etc.
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We’ve tried to do meal planning but the plan always goes awry. Usually because something makes more or fewer servings than we figured on. Then you’ve got leftovers so the plan flies out the window. We still manage to eat 95% home-cooked meals though. I recently made gyros, pita and tzatziki all from scratch (thanks to Chef John of foodwishes.com), and it was so dang good. It’s so hard to find decent gyros where I live now and was missing them. We’re really frugal too, on a day to day basis, but then splash out on things like Trex decking!
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Wow, homemade gyros! I might have to try that. We’ve found that some “restaurant” items are very hard to master (we’re terrible at Indian, with the exception of chicken tikka masala, which I believe is not authentic Indian, anyway). But it’s always fun to see how close we can get. I haven’t looked at the recipe yet, but I’m curious, did you grill the gyro meat?
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The gyro meat is baked first, then chilled, sliced and browned/grilled right before eating. Here’s a link to the recipe.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/258848/american-gyros/?internalSource=hub%20recipe&referringContentType=search%20results&clickId=cardslot%204-
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Thanks for the link, pythonesk! I believe that’ll be on the menu next week.
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My wife tells me I omitted the essential fact that we’ve been practicing meal planning for 31 years now (but who’s counting).
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