Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Save Money on the Grocery Budget by Reducing Food Waste

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Behind a mortgage, groceries are often the second most expensive line item in the budget.  If you’re looking to save more money this year, a good place to look is to reduce the grocery budget.  But don’t stop there.  Make sure to also look at the other side of the grocery budget—reducing food waste.

Whenever you waste food, you’re essentially dropping money into the garbage.  Instead, learn to reduce your food waste to stretch your grocery budget even further.  Here are some of my favorite strategies:

Save Money by Reducing Waste
Save Money by Reducing Waste

Look at your calendar before you shop.  Do you have a busy week coming up?  If so, don’t plan labor intensive meals; you just won’t have time to make them and you’ll likely have food go bad before you have time to cook it.  Instead, make some meals on the weekend to eat during the week when you’re busy or plan simple recipes and buy simple ingredients.  Rachael Ray’s Week in a Day is a great springboard for finding recipes you can make on the weekend to enjoy all week long.

Alternatively, you can choose simple meals to make on busy weeknights.  Fresh spinach can be sautéed in minutes.  Paired with a microwaved baked potato and a simple meat like a polish sausage that can be cooked quickly, and you have a fairly healthy, inexpensive meal.  Another option is to keep frozen vegetables on hand to cook quickly and pair with an easy meat and minute rice.

Buy foods your family likes.  Too often, people buy a bargain that turns out to be a waste of money because their family won’t eat it.  Buy the foods that your family will eat, not the foods that are a bargain.

Use leftovers!  Do you eat leftovers?  Some people don’t like them, but I love leftovers because they offer me one meal I don’t have to cook!  Eating leftovers can be a great way to stretch your food dollars.  If your family refuses leftovers, try to cook only as much as your family will eat in a meal so you don’t waste extras.

Create new meals with the leftovers.  Another idea is to creatively repurpose leftovers.  For instance, if you cook a whole chicken or buy a rotisserie chicken, keep the leftovers to turn into other meals like chicken enchiladas or chicken noodle soup.  Thanks to the Internet, you can find plenty of recipes for reusing leftovers.  Some chefs, like Robin Miller of the Food Network, specifically look to make meals out of leftovers to help you better utilize your time and food.

Utilize the freezer.  One of my favorite ways to reduce food waste is to use the freezer.  We recently bought a large box of individual serve guacamole.  I still had 8 left close to the expiration date, so I put them in the freezer, and now we just pull them out as we need them.  Many meals that you make and don’t want to eat all at once can be frozen for later use.

What are your favorite strategies for avoiding food waste?  Do you waste a lot of food or a minimal amount?

 

What’s Credit Insurance and How Can It Protect Me?

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This post in collaboration with Paul Brian

Credit card spending continues to increase in the United States. According to NerdWallet’s 2018 household debt survey, credit balances carried month to month increased five percent in late 2018 to surpass $420 billion.

The same survey found that around nine percent of Americans who have credit card debt don’t think they’ll ever be completely free from it. Considering the average revolving balance among households is nearly $7,000, the hopelessness makes sense.

While careless spending may be the reason for many people’s misfortunes, it doesn’t tell the whole tale. Aggressively high interest rates can punish any type of financial hardship, self-imposed or otherwise.

In these cases, things like credit insurance can prove valuable. There are many types of credit insurance, ranging from consumer to business needs. However, for the purpose of this article, we’ll discuss what consumer credit insurance is and the protections it offers.

What Is Credit Insurance?

Credit insurance is just as it sounds. It’s an insurance policy that a borrower has on their credit card. It’s a safeguard that pays off the credit card debt if something unexpected occurs that makes repayment difficult. The main types of credit insurance include credit life insurance, credit disability insurance, credit unemployment insurance, and credit property insurance.

How Do These Different Coverages Protect Me?

On a broad level, understanding how credit insurance protections work is quite straightforward. Credit life insurance pays off your debt if you pass away instead of your family being burdened by what you owe, while credit disability will cover your payments if you become disabled and aren’t able to work.

Less common types of credit insurance are unemployment insurance, which takes care of payments if someone is laid off; and credit property insurance, which protects property used to secure a loan if the property is damaged.

As ValuePenguin notes, any of these coverages can be taken out as a single or joint policy. A coverage type may also be worded differently depending on the institution offering it.

Do You Need Credit Insurance?

Credit insurance seems prudent to have, but how essential is it? It’s important to have financial protections in place that will cover you and/or your family should something unexpected occur, but doing so via credit insurance is typically the more expensive option to take.

This of course excludes situations in which credit insurance is required by the lender, such as in mortgage loans. However, this usually only happens when the borrower puts down less than 20 percent. This insurance can also be canceled once the borrower has built their equity over 20 percent.

As you peruse credit insurance terms and offers, evaluate the benefits and costs of life, disability, or supplemental unemployment insurance packages to ensure you’re getting something you actually need.

If you do find a credit insurance package you like, be sure to look at the fine print. It’s often a lack of preparedness and understanding that buries consumers in debt in the first place, which a quick scan of Freedom Debt Relief reviews unfortunately verify.

Like any credit card agreement, credit insurance policies are packed with jargon, small font, and exclusions. Ask questions until you know what you’re getting in a credit insurance policy. Ask questions like:

  • Does the insurance cover the entire loan’s entire term and balance?
  • Are there any exclusions that would impact coverage?
  • Does the lender have the right to change or cancel the policy at their discretion?
  • How long do the benefits take to be paid?

The last thing you want to do is pay for a policy monthly only to find that it doesn’t protect you in your time of need.

Teach Your Child About Finances With This Book

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As a mom and personal finance blogger, I get the opportunity to review many books.  One that I just reviewed that I can’t recommend highly enough is Sunny Lee’s book, Is Your Child a Money Master or a Money Monster?

Money Master or Money Monster?

Sunny Lee is a financial advisor, and she has taken the time to teach her twin sons about money.  In fact, her strategy has worked so well that she’s sharing all her techniques in this book.

Lee has a variety of strategies for teaching kids about money in a fun, incentive-filled way.

Offer rewards.  Lee’s strategy of offering her children rewards helps shape their behavior in a positive direction.  For instance, when her sons were in 1st grade, Lee developed the Morning Stuff Allowance Project.  Each morning, her kids had to get up when their alarms went off, tidy their rooms, get dressed, pack their backpacks, and make and eat their own breakfast and get to school on time.  If they did this every day, they earned $3 a week.

While the kids were motivated by the money, they were also unknowingly developing skills that would help them through the rest of their lives.  Even better, Lee didn’t have to fight with her boys in the morning to get up and get their chores done.  Everyone in her household could enjoy a more peaceful morning.

Play games.  As the boys got older, part of Lee’s strategy to teach them about money was to give them a safe place to experiment.  She did this by finding a variety of free, money based games online.  Her boys experimented online with running a coffee shop.  They had to decide when to discount their coffee based on the season, how much inventory to buy, etc.

Try out your skills in the real world.  Finally, Lee let her sons experiment and try their money skills in the real world.  An important component of this was to let them fail in small ways.  One son spent a large sum of money on a hat, which he loved, but then he didn’t have money available for a while after that.  Her other son learned from his brother and bought a hat at a discounted market so he wouldn’t use all of his money on one item.

Lee’s book contains seven strategies to teach your kids about money (and as a byproduct, teach them personal responsibility).  One thing I loved about the book and her strategy is that she keeps adding layers to her plan.  For instance, after her kids mastered the Morning Stuff Allowance Project, that remained in place, but Lee added on the Special Incentive Project.  If her boys chose to, they could earn additional money throughout the week by completing a book report, doing an art project, etc.  Again, she helped her children grow academically and artistically through an incentive.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to not only give their children a strong financial footing, but also a strong work ethic.

Have you read this book?  What is your favorite book to teach kids about money?