Food is Our Number One Cost Driver
This post will share with you our free food hacks and the results of us eating out 100% of the time. This is the first post of two diving into our desire to pull down our food budget.
Food is our family’s number one cost driver outside of my wife’s fun money (which happens to include all clothes for the kids) so I constantly challenge it.
Food is a problematic cost for us give the size of the expense but also the desire not eat Ramen every 5th meal. I am sure most families are in the same boat after you realize you somehow ate out twice as much as you were supposed to the month prior… the bills add up. Our family also happens to like food and quickly get bored if we eat the same thing too many times or feel like we are eating “rabbit food” all the time.
The post below shares what we have done….. I’ll take any suggestions!!
First – Bad Business Models Equal Free Food
All of the meal prep companies have been fighting for everyone’s business. These business models are flawed as a stand alone business – you are simply trying to be a fast food company with no store front and most of these companies don’t even send you fried food! Their expenses are eaten up by marketing expenses which equal FREE FOOD!
To entice you to join they all have been offering what any food company would – free food! I have tried all of these to get the free food and then I have cancelled. I’ll explain more below.
If you haven’t gotten your free food yet – just check one of these out!
- Blueapron.com
- HelloFresh.com
- Homechef.com
- Walmart, publix, and now even Chick-fil-A have “meal kits”
- P.S. if you try once and cancel…. I bet you get follow up emails like I do “come back at half off” or “here’s $30”
The food from all of these services is actually pretty good! So why did I sign up and drop all of these?
First, I wanted free or deeply discounted food and wasn’t going to stay with any subscription. Second, I was optimistic these would be helpful during our work week to cut down on the hectic schedule but they were the opposite – I ended up “planning around” the meal kit (eg What night is “meal kit night?”). Third, these all are great meals – I wouldn’t say otherwise – I am just a finance guy adding up the ingredients and watching their business model and always noticed there was one “higher end meal” and one “budget meal” included to help bring down the average cost of everything they shipped. Needless to say – I realized that realized the $7.50 to $10 a serving Target the companies had was a useful benchmark but they were giving me a pretty “budget meal” for some of these. This isn’t filet and lobster every night.
I got my free food and moved on…. except for the follow up offers!
Why Not Eat Out 100% of the Time?
So our second experiment that came out of this was eating out 100% of the time. At $7.50 to $10 a serving – why even cook with all the cheap eat places around? Before my wife I and had kids we experimented with this some… It didn’t work out either.
First the logistics – are we both meeting there after work or are we meeting at home and then going out? We ended up burning up an hour of our night with logistics that otherwise would have been cooking with a glass of wine in hand.
Second the cost – all of these “fast casual” places as well as hole in the wall places severed a lot of the same thing packaged in a different way so eventually I started “ordering up” and going for the “higher end” food. Third, the health factor also weighed in on us as well given the convenience – of course I want the Chimichanga – extra cheese please! $2 beer night – oh yeah I want one of those too! Call it boredom but eating out every night ended up being “ordering up” to feel like something different.
Finally the cost – inflation is a b****…. these meals all keep creeping up past the $20 range for 2 especially with tax. We tried even the Applebee’s 2 for $20 but after the second time we were done as in reality a vast majority of those meals are frozen food bags warmed up or deep fried. Yeah they have some healthy options but I can’t eat the oriental chicken salad at Applebee’s every night.
Finally, once ordering up didn’t do it anymore “I want something nice” – it was a matter of time – we ended up eating out at a nicer place – averaging our cost up.
I have self respect and humbleness all at the same time – I can eat ramen, I can eat cheap eats, but I couldn’t eat the same thing all the time and that’s why this failed. I trade in eating in most of the time and eating out at a fast casual place for fun for eating out all the time at fast casual places for eating at a nicer place or ordering up.
A financial fail…. pretty sure I put on some LBs as well…..
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