How my girlfriend & I save over $700 a month by cooking.
Though this concept has been talked about numerous times throughout the years, I figured maybe our experience with this may give someone better direction that’s looking to do the same.
I’m going to split this up into a few different sections (my upbringing, my maturation as an adult, and the benefits of what we’re doing). Trust me there are several ways to go about doing this but this is our system for tackling one of the biggest needs especially being that we live together.
But let’s time travel back to my early years living in Trinidad. Growing up, all I knew was home cooked-meals for lunch. Though my parents would give us money to probably buy snacks or even buy fast food from time-to-time, we knew the value of eating and getting food cooked by my mother. Of course, we would indulge in KFC, Pizza Huts, Mario Bros, restaurants and more, for either a special occasion or being lazy but it wasn’t meant to be an every-day or frequent thing. We appreciated and cherished my mother’s dedication to make sure that we were fed adequately and thoroughly satisfied.
My father would work long shifts as an engineer and my mother would always have his meals prepared so he wouldn’t have to worry about food. Still seeing this to this day, naturally influenced me to take this same approach with Samantha. I try to make sure that I have prepared lunch options for her to take on a daily basis — if she hadn’t already prepared something for herself.
I recall this one time when we asked my mother to make KFC-esque fried chicken because her cooking skills were so innate and versatile. I remember tasting the chicken and then realizing that for the most part, anything you want to cook — you probably can with the proper recipe, techniques and more. I think this holds even more true today with the power of Youtube. I could only imagine the dishes my mother would have experimented with if Youtube was so prominent three decades ago.
I digress though as I believe you got the point thus far. I wouldn’t say I was spoiled but I’ll forever be grateful for having parents who made sure we were good not only when it came to food but everything.
Alright so let’s swing this to maturation and adapting to new situations. Samantha and I have been living together for over 2 years now and almost immediately we knew how prepared we had to be when it came to food. In the initial stages, we knew what we wanted to purchase for the fridge but we didn’t know how long things were going to last and some essential things we would need. After a couple months we became more and more comfortable with understanding our specific grocery needs and scheduling our BJ’s runs. But I think the turning point was when I got into a groove and started cooking more after learning so many different things from my mother. Once this fell into place, going to the grocery became a cake walk. It began helping us with saving more money and not wasting as many things as we would before. We developed an understanding for purchasing meat, greens, and more, and how we wanted to use them and it wasn’t till long that we began to really meal-prep. Over the last few months, we’ve used one of our weekend days (preferably Sunday), to cook two different meats and various accompanying sides such as beans, green, pasta, rice, potatoes and more for the upcoming week. AND IT HAS WORKED. So well to the point that we have went through many weeks where we had so many leftovers that we would only have to cook dinner once or twice during the week. Basically each meat allows for 4–6 servings and we then fill our containers with one or two sides. Our portions aren’t big because we aren’t heavy eaters so it’s easy to make the food stretch in terms of how many containers we can make. Occasionally we make a huge pot of beef chili that lasts us probably 4 days long and I also like to purchase a pack of chicken thighs and bake 6–8 pieces that we can also use as our protein for our lunches or dinners. (This has given us more freedom during the week to either relax upon arriving home or work on personal endeavors.) In addition, Samantha has recorded all our spendings in Excel charts to monitor what we spend our money on. Which has given us the ability to analyze what we buy and if we are spending too much on certain items. It helps us to be accountable and responsible.
This has benefited us in many ways, the biggest being money. We live in New York and my last job at B-Reel was in DUMBO where there are terrible options to eat in terms of price and quantity. Truthfully the quality of food is also not great. If I decided to eat out for lunch everyday I would be spending about $12-$20 on lunch per day. Let’s average that to be $15 per day, $75 per week, and $300 per month. Samantha on the other one, doesn’t work far from home and her options are limited but also cheaper. I would say her average would be about $12 per day, $60 per week, $240 per month. That combines to be $540 per month between us for LUNCH ONLY. If we decided to eat out for dinner upon getting home, we would be looking at $30 per day, $150 per week, $600 per month. Now let’s put this in perspective with our grocery runs. Generally we spend $150-$170 every 2 month at BJ’s and we may pick up small items from our local grocery during that 2 month span so I’ll say $200 every 2 months on groceries. When it comes down to it $540 + $600 = $1140 and subtracting $200 leaves us at saving a whopping $940 per month. Of course we go out to eat from time-to-time but we also put a threshold on that so we can keep the money we save to use for other things such as vacations, personal wants, and more. Oh and we do take care of our breakfast needs to but I won’t factor that in because I’m sure that cancels itself out with us going out to eat from time-to-time.
Here’s a little quick note: over the last year, Samantha has learned to bake really well — resulting in us selling cookies and other baked goods as a side hustle and also being that I’ve grown to love cooking so much, we actually began using our place as an intimate eating experience where paying guests come to taste our dishes and desserts. So all in all, our food has been paying for itself for some months now.
When it comes down to it, you just have to find what works for you. Experiment and create your groove when it comes to this. I know it’s one of the biggest things, young adults struggle with and waste money on. However if it can work for us, it can work for you too and think about all the other things you can put that money towards.
Note: All images of food and baked goods were taken by my girlfriend, Samantha. All baked goods were made by her.
