Month: August 2014

I have been pouring over my spending habits for the last few months but especially in the past few weeks. In the last week, I have really tightened the reigns on my spending, as a way to save money and eliminate debt for good. One of the areas where I had the most wiggle room was of course, food. I can’t opt out of paying off other bills, though, I can reduce to an extant. However, I found that I was spending stupid amounts of money on food for months on end and I wanted to cut that down by a large margin. Now, as a man in my twenties, I like to eat and can eat a ton of food. I’m also 6 foot 2 and even when I’m ripped still weigh in at 180-185, so I definitely need more calories than most other people. I wanted to write a post documenting how I have gone about slashing my food bill by more than half.

Stop Eating Take Out or Restaurants

This one kind of crept up on me as the months went by. I started to look at my bank statement and realized how much I had either gone out to eat or had ordered lunch while at work. Even an inexpensive lunch at most places will still run $5-6 and do that enough and you can quickly be looking at $50 no problem. Also, I was for some reason ( cough, cough: laziness) eating fast food at least once a week. That fact was one of the major issues I needed to correct, as crappy fast food nutrition needs to have no place in my life. Even if I only spent $12 a week eating out somewhere, that still adds up to $624 a year!

Stop with the Drinks and the Snacks

I needed to cut out spending on drinks such as coffee, during my early morning shifts, as well as buying some snacks during the day to keep my energy levels up. One change was to simply buy a box of green tea bags and use one for days I have to be up really early and go to work. One box costs $2.99 and lasts me 3-4 weeks versus buying a cup of coffee or other caffeinated beverage which usually costs at least $2 each. To combat snacking, I planned my meals out more carefully and decided to eat more at breakfast time and earlier in the day, then  taper off at night. I’m usually not very hungry during the evening so even something low carb like chicken and veggies will keep me satisfied through the night. However, I need to eat more during the day, otherwise my productivity and mood plummet.

Start thinking about the long terms cost

It is easy to justify in your head that something costs two bucks and is no big deal to purchase. That is, until you start adding up all those little costs and extrapolating it out for an entire year. Even at $2 a day, that’s $720 each year, and $7200 over a decade. Yes, that is a huge total and long time period but through the power of compound interest that $7200 could be invested much more wisely and end up yielding a 6-8% each year. This is not to say you have to be completely frugal all the time but really cutting back can have huge impacts on the future, even in small amounts.

Have Staple Foods to Buy at the Grocery Store and Eat Some of the Same Things

Learning to control cravings and eat some of the same staple meals each day can go a long way to saving a ton of money each month. You can take the time to learn how to cook and prepare things in different ways so that boredom doesn’t become a factor. I try to focus on buying foods that I enjoy, could eat daily, and have nutritional value.

Some staples that I buy and the price

Whole Grain Bread- $1.99 a loaf

Whole Grain Spaghetti- 0.98 for 13.25 oz.

Light Pasta Sauce- $1.69

Bag of Stir Fry Veggies- $1.50

Eggs- $2.89 for 18 count

Oats- $2.29 for 42 oz.

Natural Peanut Butter- $4.50 for 28 oz.

Frozen Skinless Chicken Breast Tenders: $8.39 for 2.5 pounds. (Usually on sale for $6.65)

Bag of Potatoes- I forget the price on a 5lb bag of red or russet potatoes but I think it’s like 2.99 or 3.99. Either way potatoes can be a great addition to help keep you full.

A sample day for me building off this template might be, with possible additions in parenthesis:

3 Scrambled Eggs (add cheese and/or salsa) and 1 cup of oats (add raisins)

2 PBJ Sandwiches

Whole Grain Pasta with 6-10 oz chicken and a whole lotta veggies

1 cup of oats (add raisins)

That is essentially it. I could go cheaper but I elect to eat whole grains instead of processed white breads and the like. I opt for natural peanut butter which is less processed and has less sugar. I may also buy whey protein powder for extra protein for lifting weights. Apples and/or bananas also find their way onto my menu, for further vitamins and antioxidants.

Oats are a great way to add calories for cheap. 1 cup of oats has 280 calories and 20% of a daily value of Iron. Plus, a little bit of fat and plenty of fiber. I can eat 2 cups per day and it’ll only cost $2.29 for the week. Buying a canister of raisins costs me about $3.99, when I do so, but it does add some great flavor to the cooked oats.

There are plenty of other meals such as rice and beans that can also be made for dirt cheap.  Veggies are always important to include and can be done so in a really inexpensive manner. Shopping this way I can eat for as low as $130 a month and usually around $150-160 if I add some more variety. That works out to $4-6 a day which really isn’t much, probably less than most fast food meals, while being more nutritious and lasts the entire day not just one meal. I know that this way will save me a couple thousand dollars in a year’s time and that is money that can be spent on anything else of value. Hell, it can pay off a credit card and still have enough left over to invest in my portfolio. I’ve seen other experiments, where people live off like $1 a day or like $100 a month, and that’s great but it’s not my goal to eat that restrictive. Maybe the $100 a month is doable and I’ll work my way down to it but if I’m not in grinding poverty I don’t want to eat like it. I want simple, whole foods that maintain my health and don’t break the bank.

One of the things that I have always been pretty terrible at is organization. Not the simple tasks, of putting things away in some semblance of order or keeping track of where I put things. Rather, I have always been bad at sticking with things because I’ve never kept track of my progress or taken the steps each day to make something new a habit. Now, this doesn’t really hold you back in tasks which only require you to answer a basic yes or no question to determine whether something got done that day.

For instance, in high school I one day decided that I was going to stop drinking soda all together. I never planned anything out or marked on a calendar how many days into this process I was. Yet, I was successful in quitting my daily soda drinking habits. Why? I made one change in lieu of drinking soda and that was replacing it with water. Thus, I could easily ask myself whether or not I had drank soda that day and know the answer. After 30 days of “No” in a row, there’s really no point in asking. (As a side note, I dropped 15 pounds within months by dropping that habit completely).

The downside to this cold turkey method of just quitting soda ended up having a negative effect on me and how I approached more complex changes I needed to make. What happened when I needed to track my finances or my diet or what work I had done for the month? That simplistic method no longer yielded good results and the bad part of it is that it sort of became ingrained in me that this approach worked well. I could maintain changes in these more complex areas of my life for days or perhaps even a few weeks before I lost track of my progress or why I had even started in the first place.

Keeping track of multiple variables over a middling or lengthy amount of time is way too much to focus on. Can you remember off of the top of your head exactly what you ate on a Thursday three weeks ago? Maybe, but could you do every other day? Probably not. It’s crucial to understand in life that big changes are precipitated by smaller changes carried out over a long period of time. So, it is these smaller changes that are perhaps the most important thing to master in your life in order to see results. They serve as sort of a beachhead from which you can build up your force and push forward towards attaining a larger goal.

I have found that the easiest habit that I can do in order to create major change in my life is to simply write things down. It is one thing to know that you ate terribly last Wednesday but to actually have to write it out piece by piece, kind of sets it in stone how much you’re screwing up your fitness goals. Also, you start to see patterns emerge in your behaviors which you can then remedy and correct.  Many people tend to think that writing out what you eat for the day is sort of overkill or obsessive. However, when you start to do it, you realize how much it can keep you on track.

“Oh, I ate tons of pizza four days ago. Probably shouldn’t pig out today.” These simple corrections in behavior help to break down bad habits and replace them with better ones. I like to write down my workout routine, what I eat, and the amount of money I spend on food. I stopped tracking what I ate and how much I spent on food for more than a few months and it astounded me how out of whack my budget and diet became. My brain will not simply keep track of these things on its own, most likely because I’m always thinking about other things I feel are more important to me.

Even though online banking exists and I can track my purchases digitally, writing it out forces me to confront my daily choices, and I have to read and add up any receipt for the day. This way, I cannot hide from any impulse buys or foods that I know I shouldn’t be eating and since it’s a daily habit I have to think about making these changes daily and think of ways I can avoid falling into the trap. Just in the first week of starting my spending log back up again, I have saved a humongous amount of money and am on pace to spend probably 60% less on food within the next month. Yes, I am that bad at keeping track of this stuff on my own, I need structure to keep myself in line.

It seems like each day now I think of a new thing to tell myself in order to keep me on track or I find a new thing to cut out. For instance:

• I stopped thinking of small purchases in the immediate and started thinking more about their larger implication. That $2 drink each day could be $60 a month. That’s $60 I could invest in my Sharebuilder account or pay off some debt. Really makes me second guess impulse buys.
• That $2 drink isn’t water, so why are you drinking it and making your workouts less effective?
• Cancelled Netflix and Amazon Prime, saving about $200 a year. Both can be cool to have, but did I really need either of them?
• $200 on a $1000 debt is 20%, is either of them worth that? Why not pay things down instead?
• I’ve got plenty of books that need reading instead of watching some random movie. As such, I’ve finished two books I was in the middle of, almost done with another, and about half way through another. Boom! Productivity.
• Started running again and can track each entry to motivate myself to go for another run.

This one little change of writing more things down and keeping my brain in the loop of what I’m really spending my day doing is spurring so many more changes to take hold. Plus, it is simplifying just about everything in my life and it will continue to get better as these newer habits take hold and start to run more on auto-pilot. It becomes easier to make changes in life when they don’t all have to be wholesale changes. Starting a new way of eating from scratch can be hard because food addiction and the behavioral patterns that have become ingrained. However, making smaller changes and tracking areas you need to improve upon over the long haul makes it a smooth process and all of the areas in your life become more aligned to how you want them to be.

You don’t necessarily have to keep a diary of long drawn out passages to keep yourself on track and your goals in clear view. Just by writing down the food you eat, exercise you did, and the money you spent, so much of your life can start to fall into line. It’s one place you can start building from today to reach a goal somewhere in the future.