Every month when I share the ins and outs of our family’s finances, people are surprised at how little we spend on food for our family of five. Our goal is to always stay under $300, which we have done every month except January ($317). For the past 8 months (Jan-Aug 2014) the average amount we spent on groceries was $239. We had one no-spend month in there, which brings the average down.
Cooking From Scratch
One of the major contributing factors to our low grocery budget is that we buy ingredients instead of prepared or convenience food. Prepared food, whether it be from a restaurant, take-out, or from the grocery store, is generally more expensive than cooking your own meal from scratch. As you become accustomed to home-cooked foods, your taste buds won’t let you go back to prepared foods.
When we get home from our big monthly grocery shopping trip to Winco and Sam’s Club, we still don’t “have anything to eat.” Besides fresh fruits and veggies there isn’t anything we can dig right into. It all needs to be prepared. Next month, I will be showing you exactly what a month of SixFiguresUnder grocery shopping looks like.
Every family’s budget, tastes, and preferences are different, so everyone’s grocery list will vary. If you’re used to having mostly prepared and convenience foods, make small changes each month, so that the changes will be sustainable and not overwhelming. As you look through your shopping list see what items you could replace with ingredients.
Here are a few ideas:
Instead of buying a club sandwich from the deli near work, buy the ingredients to make your own sandwich to bring with you.
Instead of buying cans of soup, buy the ingredients to make a big pot of soup in the crock pot. Eat half for dinner and freeze the rest.
Instead of buying boxed pasta dinners (Pasta Roni, Hamburger Helper, etc.) or frozen lasagnas, buy the dry pasta and other ingredients to make it yourself.
Additional Benefits of Cooking From Scratch
Cooking from scratch is healthier, which will save you money in the long run when it comes to health and medical-related costs. When you cook from scratch, the ingredients are fresher and do not require any chemical preservatives.
Besides being cheaper and healthier, food cooked from scratch tastes better! From mashed potatoes to chocolate chip cookies, fresh bread to chicken noodle soup, the homemade version is always tastier than the alternative.
Do What Works For You
Cooking from scratch isn’t the only way to save on food costs. For some lifestyles and personal preferences, cooking from scratch all the time may not work. If you are interested in lowering your food expenses, consider at least experimenting with cooking from scratch.
If you have a busy schedule, take advantage of slow cooker meals. You will be amazed at the variety of healthy, delicious, and inexpensive meals you can cook in your slow cooker with very limited preparations.
Some of My Favorites
Here are a few favorites below.
You can find more great ideas here!
How About You?
- Is cooking from scratch worth the savings for you?
- What ideas do you have to help others get started cooking from scratch?
- What are your favorite meals to cook from scratch?
Hello! I enjoyed reading your article. We are also a family of five with three boys. It seems that although I cook mostly from scratch, the meat prices are really what tops are bill and we could easily spend $200 a month on just this item. Could you share your tips for this? We eat meat at every meal with the occasional meatless meal. Do you? Any tips on lowering this cost would be much appreciated! Thank you!
I would love to know how you actually spend so little. You may have already touched on that.somewhere on your website that I may have overlooked. It just does not seem possible to me and I have read so much on people who do spend so little but they don’t actually tell you how, and I would love to know. I am a single mom, I have two teenagers and a nine year old, and I spend way to much at the store and I would love to cut back but I just dont’ know how.
Hi Abby, I had this same problem when I first started to think frugal living. One of the first things I did was look at what I was buying. There were a lot of those boxed pasta dishes and rice dishes that I bought every month that even on sale are at least $1.00 a box and I would buy at least 3-4 if not more to have as side dishes. I found a recipe for the chicken rice and bought the ingredients for that and I have never bought another box of chicken rice again. I shopped the 10/10 sales for the pasta and rice and when it was all said and done that first time I made 7 batches. I gave two to my daughter and I still had extra fixings left over to make more. She was here this last weekend and I made her another batch to take home from the very first shopping trip I made to get the original ingredients. Just this one change made a huge difference. As you start to look at things differently, you’ll start to see where you can make some changes.
Oh how I miss the days when $300 a month would feed our family of 5. Now it fluctuates between $500 and $600 a month. Our oldest son is 14 and has been having some major growth spurts lately. I’m 5’11.5″ and he’s able to look straight into my eyes. We cook mostly from scratch, even the oldest boy does when he cooks, and I’d hate to think what my grocery bill would be like if we didn’t. He eats a lot of vegetables, especially greens. We are going to attempt growing some lettuces and herbs with grow lights in our apartment this Fall/Winter since our oldest really likes his greens.
That’s awesome that your teenage son likes greens and helps cook himself! The way my 5-year-old boy eats, I can only imagine what his teenage appetite will require! I’m sure you save a lot by cooking from scratch!
We cook everything from scratch too, and I feel lucky that I’ve been brought up to think about what goes into our food and how much it costs. Frankly, I’m worried when I see the ingredients in processed foods — half of it doesn’t even sound like something you want to put in your mouth!
Processed foods do have some weird stuff in them!
I agree 100% that cooking from scratch saves money, even if you can buy the pre-packaged stuff with coupons.
And boy does it taste better! Ever since I realized how easy and tastier it was to make my own soup, I haven’t bought canned, except to stock our “emergency bin” for times when the power goes out (we have a camp stove to heat it up).
Found you at Hit Me with Your Best Shot! 🙂
Yes Kim! Besides being yummier, cheaper and better for you, I love that soup is simple to make in large quantities. It would take me so many cans of soup from the store to make a single meal for my hungry family!
You’ve inspired me to try and make homemade tortillas. We’ve been wondering how to fit them into the budget because they’re so expensive to buy, but we love them with just about every meal. My husband’s grandma gave us her recipe years ago. Going to try it out one of these weekends. Thanks!
We eat tortillas all the time too! I really need to become proficient at making my our too. Right now that is one of the not-from-scratch things we buy!
I LOVE flour tortillas and so do my hips so I don’t buy them very often. I used to make them from scratch all the time then I got too busy and started to buy them and my hips were very happy indeed because they were so readily available. Now, I limit myself to one bag of tortillas – my husband doesn’t eat them too often – so it lasts me a while because I let myself eat at least 2, okay, sometimes 3, on my big breakfast morning on Sundays. I do keep corn tortillas on hand even though I don’t eat them every day and I’d like to start making my own. I just need to get motivated. A 2015 goal for sure!
Making tortillas is super easy! Masecca is a corn flour available in most grocery stores where I live (Texas), but it may be only in Latin stores elsewhere. Anyway, the only ingredients are Masecca and water. I can make a double batch on my electric griddle in about 15 minutes. Served with refried beans (made from beans I can, then mash before use), cheese (grated or the good queso fresco), scrambled egg, and salsa they are very yummy! We eat this often; it is an Americanized version of South American baleadas. It feeds our family of six (three teens) for less than $5 total.
Flour tortillas are so much better homemade! I bought some a few months ago, to save time. They were thick and tough and I only ate one. I found them several months later in my pantry. They had NOT molded; that scares me to death. There are only a few ingredients here as well, but they are a little more time consuming to the the rest time.
That should be “due” to the rest time. Ugh. Autocorrect.
Oh, one more thing, especially for Melanie, make a menu for the week – and shop for those ingredients. By the end of the day, I was tired and the idea of coming up with a “menu” just seemed to be too much – so we would just eat out. (we both work outside of the home) but when all i had to do was pick from a list of 6 or 7 choices – wow! it was easy 🙂
Amen! Menu planning really saves sanity and prevents “giving in” and getting takeout. I wrote more about how menu planning saves us money here.
Right on Stephanie! REAL food is yummier and healthier 🙂 You look like you are in great shape – chasing after those kiddos is a LOT of exercise! My kiddos are grown and I got to be a little “over conditioned” – when I decided to get serious about loosing some weight, I told myself I could have anything I wanted, as long as I cooked it at home. So far I don’t feel at all “deprived” and I am loosing weight and I feel BETTER. Oh, and our food budget is WAY better off! We used to eat out 6 or 7 nights a week. (that could explain how I got to be “over conditioned” couldn’t it!) Now we dine out about twice a month.
Wow Virginia! You’ve made some big changes! Going from eating out almost every night to just twice a month is great! That’s awesome that you’re cooking at home, losing weight, and not feeling deprived, all while saving money!
This is incredible! Food is my budget buster time and time again. We are often buying convenience food. I think the problem is we don’t know how to cook very elaborate meals, so we just settle. I’ll be interested in checking out your recipes as well as what you buy. I need inspiration. We need to cook things from scratch more and batch cook, to really get our number under.
You can find lots of simple, yet delicious and inexpensive, meals on PInterest. Just steer clear of the ones that have weird ingredients and are too fancy for every day. Cooking ahead of time and freezing really helps, whether it’s the whole meal or just chopping and freezing veggies.
This will sound so silly, but it’s been a real help for us. When you’re grilling hamburgers for dinner – grill a dozen more. Then freeze them. When you need a quick lunch or dinner, thaw them and nuke them for 30 seconds’ish – they taste just like they’ve come off the grill.
Jim, I would totally go for a frozen, pre-grilled hamburger right now! Yum! Great idea and not silly at all! Thanks for sharing (and making me hungry)!
You are a grocery shopping super hero! Cutting down on booze is our grocery-bill saver of the moment, but I’m sure there’s a lot more fat in our food budget to be cut.
You crack me up! 🙂 Cutting out or cutting down on alcohol will definitely save your budget!
This is such an important part of the budget that so many people overlook. The month we started using YNAB we didn’t change any of our spending habits. We just recorded purchases as they occurred and then discussed them at the end of the month in our first ever “budget meeting”. You can only imagine our surprise when we realized that we were spending $1000-$1100 a month on FOOD (groceries, convenience food, and dining out).
We knew after the first meeting that the number would need to go down drastically. The first month it went down to ~$750 the next we did a pantry challenge and spent ~$380. This is how we decided on our current budget of $600 ($400 groceries and $200 dining with flexibility between the categories). Side note: For two people, we do buy all organic meat, dairy and eggs and 80% organic produce; and we are both power lifters that eat a combined 6000 calories a day.
I realized that before I was buying way more convenience foods than I thought I did, and we ate out entirely too much. Then in the pantry challenge month it was extraordinarily stressful trying to make everything from scratch while each of us worked full time. So I found the happy medium.
My biggest tip about cooking from scratch is that not every meal has to be a production. You don’t always need a sauce, fancy veg, and expensive grain. Sometimes homemade PB&J works perfectly and is cheap!
Wow CeCee! You have come a long way, nearly cutting your grocery budget in half! That’s awesome!
You’re right about now making a production out of every meal! Just the thought of having a picture perfect meal every day makes me exhausted. It doesn’t have to be fancy to be yummy and healthy.
This article was perfect timing! I feel the absolute same way about coming from the grocery store, and “there’s nothing to eat”, because there’s nothing prepared yet (which my husband does NOT understand).
I love making things from scratch, but there’s certainly a tradeoff between saving money and the added health benefits of choosing healthy ingredients, and time. I’ve come to the realization that it would be a lot easier to make an extra large batch, and freeze so you have to make that item less frequently.
I think a helpful tip to cooking from scratch is to make homemade food just as convenient as fast food- make your own frozen pizza, and make your own freezer burritos, so that those nights that you don’t feel like a big production, there’s something just as inexpensive and relatively healthy ready to go. Also, I always check the ingredient list and the directions to make sure the ingredients and the directions and reasonable for our lifestyle.
Also, having great blogs as resources is great for new, easy homemade ideas. Personally, I LOVE budgetbytes .com for inexpensive, easy, homemade cooking ideas, although I’m sure there are so many more out there.
I love the idea of making your on convenience foods that are ready-to-go, but healthy and less expensive! The freezer is your best friend when it comes to that! Thanks for sharing your ideas Maggie!