Lazy Man and Money

Five Ways to Save Money with Meal Prep

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With inflation on the minds of everyone, I realized it’s been a while since I wrote anything about saving money. When I started this blog a billion years ago, I would often write about little tricks to save money. Well, now there are so many websites with so many tips. You can literally for “how to save money on toilet paper” and get a bunch of articles.

However, that doesn’t mean that all those old ideas are invalid and don’t work anymore. As I was looking through my old articles, I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few of them in one post.

  • 5 Cheap and Easy Slow Cooker Recipes

    It’s a little odd to start a top-five list with another top-five list, but sometimes weird is good. The slow cooker is the ultimate in Lazy Man food prep. I can put together some spaghetti sauce, sausages, peppers, and onions and turn on the switch and have a great meal later that night.

  • Meal Prep for College Students
    I didn’t write this one, but I wish I had. Meal Prepify has 54 meal prep ideas for college students. At $2 a meal, it’s a good way to save money. Don’t be embarrassed to eat like a college student. I’m 46 years old and I still eat instant Ramen noodles. (I just use less salt/seasoning.)
  • Budget Hack: Shredded Chicken
    When I wrote that article in 2015, I wrote, “For years now I’ve seen [boneless, skinless chicken breast] at $1.99/lb. price. Who knew that chicken was immune to inflation?”

    The price of boneless, skinless chicken breast is still about $1.99/lb. near me. I can still find the occasional sales cheaper than that. In fact, it’s so cheap that I started to put shredded chicken in my dog’s food instead of cheese. (He’s picky and needs something.) It’s great healthy and versatile. While on the topic of healthy meal prep, Meal Prepify has some healthy, cheap recipes

  • Does Foodsaver Save You Money
    I’m including this article because I almost forgot about the Foodsaver. Back in 2007, we used it for everything. Now, I don’t think we’ve used it in the last 4-5 years. It’s also funny to see what constituted a somewhat quality blog post worth getting 20 comments back in 2007. It’s almost like comparing black and white TV to 4K.

    I’m inspired to get out the food marinator though. You put the meat in a plastic thing with the marinade and suck out all the air so the marinade gets into the meat much more quickly. The key to saving money comes from avoiding the plastic bags and using the wide-mouth jar sealing attachment.

  • Things I love – InstantPot
    I think InstantPots were not super popular back in 2016 when I wrote the article, but they are everywhere now. I still haven’t learned to work it. My wife is great with it though. She belongs to an InstantPot Facebook group and has a bunch of attachments. We had fajitas for Cinco de Mayo. It was much better than going out to the one Mexican restaurant in our area that had a 3-hour wait last year.

    The InstantPot saves us money by helping us avoid restaurants when we don’t have anything defrosted or prepared.

In retrospect, some of these ideas may not be great ways to save money. They may fill a role for some people though. As a bonus, here’s an easy homemade hummus recipe. When I was shopping for hummus for my wife in California back in 2009 it was expensive. Nowadays, we have an Aldi and hummus is cheap there, so we don’t make it from scratch anymore. I think there are a lot of places that don’t have an Aldi option – and inflation may make these prepared foods more expensive – so maybe it’s useful? Let me know in the comments.

Save Money by Eating Down Your Food

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Halloween is over and my 3-year old is sad. He doesn’t understand where the spooky door went and still wants to wear his orange spider socks. While orange spider socks can be year-round fun, it is time to turn the page. I’ve found the easiest way to do that is to get him excited about the next holiday, Thanksgiving.

With Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to turkey. And those thoughts turn to leftovers. There’s going to be a lot food coming in at the end of the month. So this month, I’m going to focus on eating down all the food in my pantry. That is, as soon as I get back from vacation.

I probably have over $200 worth of food in a chest freezer. The food storage in my basement is probably worth the same.

With that in mind, I’m going turn this over to my wife who has the following advice:

Go to AllRecipes and do an ingredient search for all the random stuff that you have sitting around.

I didn’t realize how much random stuff we had until she mentioned some spices that I had never heard of before. (I already forgot what they are.)

Because I’m on vacation and this is mostly common sense, I’m not going to waste any more of your time today. Will you join me in making November “Eat Down Your Food” month?

Saving Money on Food While Traveling?

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I don’t like to do back-to-back “Ask the Readers”, but today I’m going to break the (unwritten) rules.

Our family is going on road-trip vacation soon. We are hopping from hotel to hotel bringing the kids to Sesame Place, Hershey Park, Crayola World, and the Philadephia children’s museum.

We are looking to be frugal on this vacation. The idea is to avoid spending a hundred dollars a day on food at restaurants. I’m sure we are going to spend some money on them, but we don’t need to eat all three meals at them.

So the question is, “What can we buy in advance and bring with us to make meals?”

I’m going with the assumption that either a refrigerator or microwave would be a nice surprise at the hotels. We tried to research it, but got conflicting information from the pictures on the web and the TripAdvisor reviews. So we’ll bring some canned food (it can’t hurt), but we can’t rely on being able to heat it up. Also, I’m years removed from my college days of microwaving canned green beans as a snack.

Let’s also assume that for a week we aren’t too concerned about eating healthy. Bringing fruit is a no-brainer, but beyond that everything is in play… even Chef Boyardee. The only thing I’m taking off the table is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’m just not a fan.

So far I’ve been focusing on drinks. It’s low-lying fruit. We don’t need to pay $2 for a soda when we can bring them. I hit our local warehouse store (BJ’s) and found Horizon Milk and Honest Kids juice boxes. It’s perfect for the kids as neither require refrigeration.

I also set aside some nutrition bars and peanuts. They are good snacks, but it is hard to build a meal around them.

So what do you think? Any suggestions?

P.S. Road Trip was a greatly underrated movie. I miss those kind of American Pie genre movies.

Reader Email: What is a Good Food Budget?

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[Editor’s Note: Sorry for the lack of posts of late. I’m moving this week and traveling the next. In the mean time Cox Communications seems to be completely inept at setting up an Internet connection. Hopefully with the travel, I’ll have better access to Internet than I do now.]

A regular reader, Mike sent me the following email:

Subject: Question for your readers

Body: My wife and I live by ourselves. Our largest monthly expenses are her student loans, the mortgage, and then food. Are we spending too much on food? We average about $200/mo on sit down restaurants, $200/mo on fast food, and about $150/mo on groceries. This comes to about $9-10 per person/day. Too much? Tips to save?

I like how Mike is focusing on the biggest expenses and looking to bring them down. It’s much better than attacking the small things (though the small things can add up to be equal or more than the top big expense).

People typically spend a good amount on food, especially eating out. The USDA has some guidelines on how much people spend on groceries. Using the most recent data, a typical couple in the 19-50 range (a typical Lazy Man reader) would spend between $87.30 and $111.50 a week on thrifty or low-cost plans. I’m going to presume that the typical Lazy Man reader is going to be skewed to the more frugal options since we tend to be more mindful with our spending. The average of the thrifty and low-cost plans comes to about $100 a week for a couple or a little more than $14 a day. Per person this works out to be $7. Mike’s $9-10 per person estimate for all food (groceries & restaurants) comes in at around $136 per week which puts him almost exactly at the USDA’s moderate cost number of $138.70. Since the USDA’s number is about groceries only Mike appears to be doing great overall.

As for tips to save, I’ve got some Amex Blue Cash will put 3-6% back in your pocket on groceries. Unfortunately, Mike emailed me back to say that his grocery store doesn’t take credit cards (imagine that!). All is not lost though, he can use a debit card that can earn up to 2% back from Perkstreet.

As for restaurants, Mint has some good ways to track spending. (Side Note: It’s been too long since I’ve checked out their tools myself. That’s going on my to-do list.) It looks like Mike has already done the math to compile the $400/mo. number (I’m combining fast food and sit down restaurants). I don’t have comparison numbers for restaurants, but sit-down restaurants would be the place to focus on saving money. The cost per meal at one can be ten times what you can make at home. I have my own set of tips for save money at restaurants. One can consider eating out at a sit-down restaurant as entertainment too as the ambiance typically plays a role in the value.

Fast food restaurants can be cheap if you make the most out of value menus, but they typically don’t win any awards for great nutrition. From a cost perspective, a dollar McDouble is a pretty frugal meal… four of them a day (around 1500 calories) would set you back $120 a month, which is a pretty low food budget. I’m not recommending that, we say how that worked out for Morgan Spurlock in Super-Size Me, but the numbers illustrate how an occasional fast food trip can fit a frugal budget.

It’s hard to put a strict “you should spend $X amount on food” guideline in place. Geographic region, diet requirements (some people choose to pay more for organic), and other factors (time to clip coupons) can move your food budget in either direction. This is why I would focus on making sure that my spending is in a fiscally responsible range. Some of the tools I mentioned above can help provide a sanity check to make sure they are fiscally responsible.

Getting back to the subject of Mike’s email. He wanted to put the question to the readers. So now it is your turn to give feedback. I’m particularly interested if someone can find some food spending to income ratio numbers. That strikes me as a valuable piece of the puzzle.

If you have a personal finance question contact me and perhaps you can be featured in a future Lazy Man and Money article. And don’t be shy, we’ll keep things anonymous.

Hedge Rising Food and Gas Prices with ETFs

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I’ve been following the financial news a little more lately than I have in past. I don’t like what I hear.

An interview with a Shell Oil representative is claiming we might be paying $5 a gallon in two years. I shudder to think about what that means for me for California because we are up there with the most expensive gas in the nation. It’s a good thing that I work at home and don’t drive too much.

Then earlier today, I came across this article that predicted food costs more than ever and the United Nations says prices can go much higher.

Great googly moogly, higher gas prices and higher food prices?!?! What can be done about this? I’ll tell you what I’m doing: hedging my investments. When gas was cheap, I bought some PowerShares DB Oil Fund (NYSE:DBO). I also bought some PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund. Investing in these two commodities takes some of the sting away from rising prices.

Looking for a great way to complement that strategy? How about implementing these tips to save money on groceries and save money on gas?

What do you think? Are you hedging your bets against higher prices or not? Is now the time buy or have prices of these ETFs already risen too much? Is this six straight question I’ve asked? Yes it is.