I know you have heard it before…cooking at home from scratch will make a real difference in the amount of money that you spend on food. It is probably the number one way to start seeing money left over at the end of the month.
It isn’t always easy to keep the motivation up for cooking at home, but like anything, you can get into the flow and the habit of it. First start with the baby step of preparing meals at home. You can get started by using some convenience items. Once you get used to the idea of food is prepared at home not bought in restaurants, you can then start to graduate with making food more from scratch, such as homemade bread or chopping and cooking your own vegetables instead of buying them conveniently prepared.
So why is home cooking so important to to the budget? Well, food is one of the largest expenses that we have today, and the one area, unlike your mortgage or car payment that you can easily adjust to spend less. You might be surprised at how much your family spends on food in a month.
The first thing to do, now don’t groan, is to set a monthly budget for your food. Everything that you consume for energy, be it a ham sandwich prepared at home to a coffee at the convenience store, should be accounted for. This is the tedious part of it all. One way to make it less so is to use the envelope system.
Determine how much you think you need for food for the month, take it out in cash and place it in an envelope. Then whenever you spend money on food, take it only out of that envelope. It will make it very apparent how much more you spend on food when you don’t cook at home and how quickly the money can run out. it may just give you a wake up call and the extra motivation you need to put in the effort to cook at home.
Cooking at home doesn’t have to be drudgery or time consuming. There are plenty of easy recipes and ideas right here at Families.com to help you cook at home and spend less.
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