I often hear/read comments to those who are frugal in general areas, about how unrealistic and time consuming it must be.  I want to address that as it applies specifically to food planning.  After all, saving on your food bill generally means cooking from scratch, shopping carefully, and planning ahead, so obviously only a tiny percentage of the population could ever find time for that!  After all, the rest of us actually have a life!

 I think the amount of time that people estimate has to be spent in the kitchen is significantly over estimated. And in fact, cooking from scratch doesn’t need to take much longer than buying ready made food, particularly when you take into account the time savings of planning ahead (for example, it keeps you from running in and out of the stores several times a week).

I’m a busy mom with eight kids ranging from 1-15 years old, all of whom are home all day.  That means I need to homeschool everyone while taking care of a one and two year old, run my business, have time to spend with my husband and kids in a relaxed way, and have personal time as well as time for my friends, in addition to serving three meals a day! How in the world could I keep our budget to $600 a month for our family of ten (I’m not yet used to the sound of such a  high monthly amount, since I raised it by $100 recently :)) if it meant hours every day in the kitchen?!? 

No, cooking from scratch and shopping with an eye for bargains definitely doesn’t take nearly as much time as you might think.  I probably spend less time shopping than the majority of people – I take one day a month and buy everything, with another hour thrown in later in the month to restock the veggies.  The main factor involved in cooking from scratch is: planning ahead.

For example, dried beans have a reputation for being time consuming and unrealistic to make at home.  But dried beans actually take less than five minutes of hands on time.  That’s hardly longer than the time it would take to open a couple of cans of beans!  Here’s what you do: first you soak them overnight – fill a pot with water, and dump in the beans – less than one minute.  Once they’re soaked, put fresh water in the pot and put them on the fire – another minute. Cooking them takes a while, but once you’ve turned the fire on, there’s no other energy involved except being home and turning the fire off when they’re done.  That can be done when you get home from a long day of work, and they can be turned off before you go to bed – in other words, anyone could find time to do this.  It doesn’t take any more time to do a large amount than a small amount, and if you do a big potful, you can bag them into portion size amounts, and put them in your freezer. 

What about breakfast?  Hot cereals take just a few minutes to prepare.  And if you soak your oatmeal, for example, the night before, then you can further cut down cooking time, and in the morning all you need to do is heat it up and it’s ready to eat – five minutes, max.  And that means even a large amount for a big family – it could take almost that long to pour bowls of cold cereal and milk for everyone!  Mixing up a batch of muffins for breakfast or baked oatmeal takes more time, but even this takes only about fifteen minutes, can easily be doubled or quadrupled (so your time and energy are maximized, and you have future batches to pull out of the freezer for your own fast food), and can be mixed up the night before.  The next morning, just pop it into the oven when you get up, and by the time everyone is dressed and at the table, pull out a fresh batch of muffins or a breakfast loaf.  Scrambled eggs are another quick dish.  French toast, pancakes, and waffles can all be made ahead and frozen, though I like to make them fresh, usually on Sundays, when our schedules are less full. 

What about dinners?  There are lots of kinds of dishes to make, but I keep it simple.  I enjoy cooking, but I enjoy relaxing over a good picture book with my toddler or reading a chapter book to my middle kids more, so that’s where I’d rather spend my time.  Baked potatoes, pasta, and rice make for quick and easy side dishes, and you can quickly teach your kids how to make these.  There are so many possible dishes that I can’t really even start to list ideas here, but I already mentioned that we do a lot of stew-type meals in the winter – throw a bunch of compatible ingredients together and heat.  🙂  Tonight I defrosted some chili, mixed it with cooked beans in the fridge, and heated them together.  We had tacos with the chili mix and brown rice for our main dish, with some carrot kugel on the side – again, not much  hands on time spent, but a tasty and filling dinner. 

Now I know that some families expect something much more elaborate than that, but frugality isn’t only about saving money.  The time I have is limited and of value to me, and I spend it as such.  I won’t make three different meals to accomodate picky eaters – which is probably why none of our kids have ever been picky eaters, and I won’t make a three course meal every night.  My goal is tasty, nutritious food that nourishes everyone, eaten together in a relaxing environment where we can talk, share, and connect.  Life is all about making choices, and fancy foods aren’t going to enhance my goals, so that’s one decision made. 

Remember, most of the time it takes to prepare food is spent not in preparing it, but in actually baking or cooking it, but that’s a passive process that doesn’t involve any of your energy.  Once you organize your prep time, you’ll find you can get a lot done in much less time than you might have previously expected.

There are things that I do that take more time than this, like canning or dehydrating.  I’m not going to try to convince you that doing it will save you time.  I don’t do those things to save time, I do them to save money and for the convenience of having it there when I need it.  That includes situations as simple and common as when I’m out all day and didn’t think to pull something out of the freezer to defrost early enough, to the less likely scenario of losing power and the food in my freezer being spoiled.  But these aren’t necessary to keep your food bill low by any means – I didn’t start canning or dehydrating until this year, and my food budget has been very low for many, many years.  In some ways, I’ve probably added to my food costs by doing this, because I buy more than what I need for the month in order to preserve some for later on. 

Avivah

I’ve periodically told my kids that’s it’s important to pay attention when you go shopping, and since I’ve had several instances this past week that came up, I thought I’d share this thought with you.

Don’t assume that whatever you’re charged is what you’re supposed to be charged.  Sale items don’t always ring up as such, and some stores have a policy that if you’re mischarged for an item, they’ll give you the item for free. But even without that policy, pay attention when you’re checking out in the grocery that everything has scanned properly.  The thrift store I’ve shopped in for years has a new computer system, one that makes it almost impossible to see if you’re being charge correctly when you check out, as the discounted price doesn’t show up on the screen.  It took me fifteen minutes after I got home to figure it out last week (I couldn’t work it out in the store, it was way too complicated), and it had six errors on it.  Fortunately, the mistakes evened out – I was overcharged for some things, undercharged for one, and not charged at all for another – so I didn’t need to go back.  By the way, I feel that if there’s an error of any sort, even not in your favor, that it should be corrected.  A number of times I’ve gone to customer service (this happened again last week at the grocery store for a 9.95 charge) when an item wasn’t on my bill after checking out that should have been, and asked them to ring up the missing item so that I could pay for it.  Spending your money responsibly is important, but being ethical is even more important, and I don’t believe there are any true savings on dishonestly aquired money or things. 

Last week I noticed that I was credited only $14.50 for a rebate I submitted online to my drugstore, instead of $20.  When I saw that and realized I had thrown away my receipt, I didn’t think I’d have much luck getting the full rebate (since I couldn’t ‘prove’ what I paid), but I called anyway to ask about it.  They didn’t ask for my receipt (because they were charging the same amount on this across the country in conjunction with the rebate, so they knew what I said I paid was true), told me it was a processing error, and refunded the $5.50 immediately (and since I had it put on my store gift card, I received another 10% on top of that!).  So it took me less than five minutes to ‘earn’ $6. 

Several days ago I called my phone company to remove one of the additional services I have for my line, after seeing that we really don’t use it and the extra cost isn’t being justified.  While I was on the phone, the customer service rep told me that they would take the monthly charge of $5.50 for that feature off, but would also lower my monthly total bill by another $10.99 (it’s a special they’re giving to those who call to make changes, it seems, not advertised), increase my internet connection speed, and otherwise keep all the same features.  I’ll get this price for another year, before it will shift back to the regular price I’m paying.  I was on the phone for a few minutes, and that will save us $16.50 every month (not including the tax on that) – it may not seem like a lot of money, but we’ll have over $240 more in our pockets in the course of a year than if I hadn’t made the call.

Today I was expecting a delivery that I paid extra for in order to get it quickly.  Though the company emailed to say it would be here today, it never showed up.  I called the company (and waited on the line for at least ten minutes until I got a rep – I browsed the internet and checked my emails while I waited), and was told that it wasn’t supposed to be here until tomorrow.  I told them that the email they sent said it would be here today, and offered to forward it to the rep so he could see for himself.  No need, he assured me.  The full amount for the rush shipping (over $38) was refunded to my credit card while I was still on the line.  Was it worth the time?  I thought so…

Though I usually try to pay a little extra on the mortgage every month, I’ve never been able to do more than that.  Our mortgage is a significant portion of our take home pay, but after two years, for the first time last month I was able to make an extra month’s payment.  When I paid it, I clearly labelled it ‘additional principal’.  Imagine my surprise when my mortgage statement came a couple of weeks later, and said that this month’s bill was paid, but the principal wasn’t decreased at all!  They had applied my principal payment towards the coming month’s payment (meaning mostly interest).  I called the bank to straighten this out, and had a chance to practice being patient as the representative repeatedly told me that I had paid my mortgage payment for this month so I didn’t need to send in anything else until next month.  Finally she looked at the records and agreed that I did make an extra payment, but because it wasn’t labelled as intended to go towards principal, they automatically apply it in a way that benefits them (she didn’t use those words to explain it :)), and told me that I was at fault for not making a note of it.  I told her it had been labelled (and since I pay online, it would be very, very easy to show proof of this), and she quickly apologized for their error and took care of properly crediting it to our future principal.  This would be fun to figure out how much we saved by following up with the bank, as it saved us another 28 years of interest at 6.5% – I can’t figure that out in my head, with all the amortization rates, but I’m sure it’s significant.

None of these are earthshaking or exciting, but little things add up, and it all comes from paying attention to the details.  I see this as a matter of being a good steward of the money that we have – I gladly pay what I need to for the services or goods we buy, but it’s senseless to spend unnecessarily for no additional benefit!

Avivah