Budget Reduction – Meal Planning

Budgeting has revealed several categories of unnecessary over-spending and a general lack of control. When you first start budgeting, similar to the Konmari system, you are instantly surprised to discover where your money is going. This is really just tracking your spending. When you begin to build the budget you start to see where you’re excessively spending.

I really can’t say I was surprised in my food spending. Food is complicated for me and we’ll leave it there for now. See May’s post for more. I tackled many other categories first and this is the year to tackle Food spending. As of the end of 2019 it had become my largest category of spending with a consistent trend of $800+/month. For myself….alone.

At first I would enter every food purchase individually, then I started lumping into one entry per month by store. This gets scary…

October 2018 Food:

YIKES! A food budget of $800 and I went over by more than 30%. Let’s fast forward a bit…say 1 year.

So, with a year of working on taming my expenses I was finally close to hitting my budget’s target. Keep in mind that going over was possible because of sacrificing savings or cutting back in other categories. I worked on bringing all categories down and during that time I have made significant progress in other categories. This one’s about food.

I put all food in one category to keep my budget management simpler. I need that due to my brain injury. I also need to interact with the information directly. I used to hand-write every expense. Something about converting information through my muscle memory center helped to put it in my short-term memory. Eventually I put it in a spreadsheet but I still enter every line item myself at this time. Automating is the goal for June.

So, don’t be fooled by the grocery store entries. Most of that would spoil or was my breakfast or an attempt to improve my diet.

January’s goal is simple. Cut the budget in half by cooking at home! No worrying about allergies or the nutritious value of what I eat. It’s a challenge about money. Find out if, in one month, I can cut my budget to $400 and stay under it.

Up to this point I still don’t love to meal plan, but the key to making less money stretch the same time-frame is to:

1. Waste no food
2. Keep ingredients simple
3. Make food that you will definitely want to eat

I dug through foods that I have liked eating all the way back to childhood, but mostly what I request when I’m home with family. Tacos! Also, lean meals like chicken and rice. Simple meals like cheese and crackers. And my favorite…fried rice!

In order to avoid wasting food, I discovered that, while learning, grocery shopping had to be done at least once a week, sometimes more.

Below you can see the results of several meal experiments during the month. Everything was edible. The pancakes were not worth it. It’s some odd Paleo mix that was on sale. I’m not sure if I’ve ever made pancakes before but this flour was interesting. As you can see, some were too burnt to enjoy and got thrown away but thankfully I’d spent no money on them as I bought them prior to this month. The fried rice lacked flavor as well.

My mother told me once that, when she was learning to make meals, she would take notes about how much of what ingredients she used, how it was cooked, for how long, and what the result was. I don’t recall ever seeing her take notes, so perhaps it was a faster learning process than it’s been for me!

The good news is that I did not starve, and I never had to go out and buy something else because the food was inedible. I also did not get to eat out…not once. Toward the end of the month I considered it because my tracking indicated that I could afford a meal out (fast food type).

Here are the results!

No joke. A ran to the grocery store for tortillas in the last few days and it popped me over my budget by 77 cents!

Overall, this was a great challenge. I found it wasn’t really that hard or saddening to say goodbye to eating out, for a month. I definitely picked some food in limited quantities that I was having some allergic reactions to and I did have to go to the grocery store more than weekly.

Also, vending machines at work are evil (expense labelled “Company Kitchen” in the tables above). This expense included soda, breakfast bars, and concessional sugar rush inducing candies. It’s unnecessary to spend $1.98 on a bottle of pop when I could have brought them from home and kept them in the fridge.

For the future, bring soda from home and cut some of it back (I think there were sometimes 5/day). I’d rather have cans anyway. Better on-the-go snack options are required as well as sweet-tooth food. This alone would cut the expenses by $20-30 easily.

In conclusion:

• Great challenge that I will definitely do in the future
• Getting groceries once a week or more is a better option for me. I have a small local grocer one block away from me…in fact I should walk, but baby steps! Also, I’m more likely to have allergic responses as the food ages.
• I’m confident the monthly expense can be lowered further by shopping seasonally or by sales, etc. Trying the challenge later, after I have regular meals set, would give me an opportunity to maximize some other techniques.
• This opened up some buffer in my budget goals as well. If I remember correctly, this was a three paycheck month but I was able to put money aside for projects (as well as meet savings goals).
• Oh and bring your own snacks!