Have you ever tried to sit down and actually calculate just how much you spend on food each month? Or maybe if you want to start small, how about how much you spend on food each week? If you haven’t tried it, you might want to do so. You could actually be surprised at just how much you are spending, and better yet, you might be able to find some ways to cut back on your food spending. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Check your portions
We did this recently, and we were surprised at how much we were eating! My partner and I love our food, but little did we realise that the portions we serve for each meal could actually feed more than one person. So we started to cut back little by little. For example, while we used to serve four to five pork chops per meal, we now serve two to three chops instead. This not only cut down our costs, but we also lessened our food intake. Obviously, that has been good for our health and fitness regimen.

Check your sides
Do you really need all those side dishes? Perhaps you can survive and be satisfied with one side instead of more. Perhaps you can vary your side dishes and occasionally serve healthier and cheaper variations. Let’s go back to the example of the pork chops. We used to have at least two side dishes. Sometimes it could be rice and broccoli. Sometimes it was soup and bread. More often than not, however, it would be a combination of two or three of those side dishes. Lately, we have been trying to stick with one side dish, say broccoli. We found out that we could still be full and our palates satisfied after all!

Find drink substitutes
What do you drink with each meal? If you are like us, you would probably “need” some sort of cola or juice. For dinner, perhaps wine. For snacks, perhaps you go for juices, beer, and other alcoholic beverages. Why don’t you try drinking more water instead? Since we have started drinking more water throughout the day, we have been saving a considerable amount of money. Not only that, we have also lessened our caloric intake as Coke is no longer a fixture in our fridge.

Discover fruits and vegetables
We are carnivores – big time. While I do like my vegetables, the main focus of most of our meals is the meat. Pork, beef, lamb, turkey – it does not matter as long as there is meat, and lots of it! You know, however, how expensive meat can be. So a good thing to do would be to learn to try and like cheaper kinds of food such as vegetables and fruits. Again, not only would they be more beneficial to your overall well being, but eating more of these would also give you great financial benefits.

What do you think? Would these things be doable? I certainly think so!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Budgeting, Saving, Personal Finance, Advice . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.