budget — Beating Broke

Save Money on the Grocery Budget by Reducing Food Waste

March 25, 2019 By MelissaB 1 Comment

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:

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?

The Importance of Fixing Things Sooner Rather than Later

January 10, 2019 By MelissaB 2 Comments

A few years ago, my brakes started making noise whenever I pushed the brake pedal. I procrastinated quite a while before I took the car into the shop because I didn’t have the money for the repair. However, because I waited so long, the brakes had worn down to the rotors, so my repair was much more expensive than it would have been had I come in right away.

But Wait! I Hadn’t Learned the Lesson Yet!

You would think I’d have learned my lesson, but no, I haven’t.

We own a minivan that is 11.5 years old and has 167,000 miles on it. A while ago, one of the back sliding door handles broke, so we could no longer use it from the outside. No worries. We simply herded all the kids in through the other side door. Was it a pain? Just a little bit, but we didn’t want to spend $200 to $300 on a door handle repair when we had so many other pressing expenses.

But, then the other sliding door broke. The wire coil started to fray, so we couldn’t open the door. The repair for the outer wire coil? A cool $900 to $1,000. Ouch.

So, we started opening the driver’s side door and reaching around to open the side door with the outside broken handle by using the inside handle. By now, we were starting to feel a bit, um, special, I’ll say, because of our unusual way to open the door. Still, we put off the repair because we had other expenses like a $210 garage door repair and a $90 air conditioning tune up along with a $900 deposit for braces for our son.

All was okay until the inside door handle broke. Now, the only way the kids can get in and out of the car is through the front doors. The special meter has gone up enormously, and even the kids are talking about how embarrassed the are to get in and out of the car. Now that the repair is inevitable, I called the shop to find out the repair will likely be $400 to $500 because they’ll have to remove the door and replace both the inside and outside door handle.

Lesson learned. When a repair is needed, make the repair. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up paying more in the future.

How to Get the Money Together

If your budget is tight like ours is, there are ways to get the money together to make a smaller repair immediately so you don’t have to pay more for a larger repair later:

Raid your emergency fund. This is the easiest. If you have an emergency fund, use the money and then rebuild the emergency fund as quickly as possible.

Have a pantry challenge for a week. We spend approximately $150 to $200 a week for groceries. By taking just one week to eat only what we have in the house and not going to the grocery store, we could have had the money for the handle repair before it got worse. Lesson learned.

Sell stuff. Everyone has stuff around the house that they don’t need or don’t use. Sell things at second hand stores, sports resale stores, or eBay or Facebook. You’ll be surprised how quickly the money will add up.

Do you procrastinate on repairs because your budget is tight? If so, like us, has that rationale ended up costing you more money?

Living on a Tight Budget: Should Groceries Be the First Place You Cut?

January 8, 2019 By MelissaB Leave a Comment

If you’re like me, the last few years, you may have felt that you’re simply treading water when it comes to income and expenses. It seems every time our income goes up, our expenses go up, and I’m not talking about lifestyle inflation but rather insurance premiums and deductibles, etc.

Like many people, I try to cut corners to make our money stretch as far as I can. I’ve certainly had times a few years ago when I bought the cheapest groceries that I could find by using coupons and sales, even though the food was processed and not that good for my body.

I rationalized that I was being frugal, and, I’ll admit it, I was proud of myself. Never mind that we were eating casseroles that we didn’t really like made with processed foods or that the leftovers often went to waste because we didn’t want to eat the meal again. Never mind that both my husband and I had cholesterol well over 200 even though we were in our thirties.

Change in Eating Habits

However, over the last few years, my opinions on grocery shopping, the foods we eat, and how to save money have changed. I still like to save money (and I still need to in order to make our budget stretch), but now I do it differently, and I feed my family differently. A few years ago, I went Paleo. I dropped a lot of weight, and my cholesterol level settled around 155, even though I was a few years older. True, our grocery budget went up, but not by as much as I expected. I learned ways to buy healthy food at a reasonable price.

Where Else Can You Cut Besides Groceries?

Should you Cut groceries first? — Where would you cut first?

Sometimes, especially when money is tight, groceries seem like an easy place to cut. Convenience foods bought with coupons can be had for a steal. Take a look around Pinterest, and you’ll find many posts of bloggers touting how little they spend for groceries.

But is this a good thing? I know groceries are typically one of the largest monthly expenses for a family, but should this automatically be the place we look first to reduce our budget? After all, there is great truth in the adage, “Pay your farmer now, or pay the doctor later. In fact, “Americans spend nearly 20% of their income on healthcare costs, while on average spending 10% of their income on food. . .Considering the age-old adage, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ may be the first step to attempt to reduce healthcare spending—and the key place to start is food consumption. If you start to consider your diet a form of preventative health care, you might start rethinking your daily meals” (University of New Hampshire).

Take a look at your budget. If you don’t automatically slash your grocery budget, where else can you cut expenses?

If you don’t short change your body healthy foods, you’ll save thousands on health care later on. Meanwhile, why not consider dropping your smartphone and getting a “dumb” phone? (Yes, I still have a flip phone for emergencies that we bought 10 years ago.) Can you drive your current vehicle a little longer so you don’t need to have a new car loan? Can you drop cable? Do you have subscriptions you’re paying for but you don’t use? Likely, there are several lifestyle choices you can make to cut your expenses without compromising the quality of food you can buy and eat.

Do you cut other expenses so you can continue to buy quality foods, or do you prefer to slash your grocery budget?