Fast Food Vs. Your Budget: "Cheap" Convenience Food Isn't All that Inexpensive!

Most people understand that eating out regularly costs a lot of money. But many assume that fast-food is cheap enough to be worth the convenience of eating it often, even daily. It may be for some, but for those who are looking for ways to cut spending, eating fast-food is a sneaky budget breaker. Consider for a moment the monthly cost of eating at a fast food restaurant. If you feed your family of four just one fast food meal a day, averaging $4.99 for each meal, you will spend just under $20 a day.

That doesn't look like much, until you multiply it by 30 days...$598.80 is a big chunk out of a strained budget. Even if your family eats fast food for only one meal a day, 3 times a week, you will spend $239 on that alone for the month, and you will still be left needing to purchase food for the majority of the week. If you add just one more expensive restaurant meal per month (say, a nice Sunday dinner averaging $10 per person), your family of four will spend another $160 per month. Add that to the 3 times a week fast food and you will spend $399 a month, still having only covered four meals a week. If you eat out regularly, can you afford to feed your family the rest of the week, and still pay your bills? Convenience, it seems, is very, very costly.

So, what can you do to cut your food costs? It would seem obvious that eliminating the habit of eating out is the first step. Even if you purchase convenience foods from a grocery store (especially discount stores like Aldis, Save-a-Lot, or Big Lots), you will probably cut your food bill in half. Better still, though, would be to come up with a game plan for your meals and build a shopping list around what you know you'll be eating each week. You can do this according to your family's taste in food, and keep it very simple.

Most people eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast every day, so you simply need to figure out how much breakfast food you will need each month. Planning lunch should also be quite simple-sandwiches are cheap and easy to put together, and you can add sides of salad, crackers, chips, and vegetable sticks. If you are careful about where you shop, and not brand-picky, you should be well able to concoct breakfasts and lunches that cost far less than they would at a fast food place.

The real planning you will need to do is for suppers, but even this doesn't have to be difficult. Figure out what meals your family likes, get a large calendar, and write a favorite meal in the box for each day of the month. Then, knowing what you will need to prepare those meals, write up your shopping list. This gets easier with practice, and you may eventually find that it comes quite naturally. If you can plan meals for the whole month, you will also be able to save money by buying certain things in bulk when they're on sale-for instance, watching for a sale on beef at your grocery store and stocking up, or taking advantage of two for one deals on pasta or cereals.

Here's an example of one of my weekly menus for February:
Feb4-Feb10
S: Crockpot Steak, tortillas, salad
M: Turkey, Rice and Vegetable Casserole
T: Chicken Soup with Dumplings
W: Sweet potatoes, salad
T: Black Bean Chili, salad
F: Fish, potatoes, vegetables
S: Honey Baked Chicken, rice, corn

And here is the shopping list for that week, with the cost based on the prices I find at Aldis:
tortillas (.99)
bread (.79) (for PB&J sandwiches when we don't eat leftovers for lunch)
sweet potatoes (.99/lb)
3 salad (.89)
fish (3.99)
2 corn (.79)
2 peas (.79)
1 bag mixed vegetables (1.29)
4 cans black beans (.49) TOTAL: $17.82

This list is so short because I will have already bought many of the foods in bulk, at the very beginning of the month. When the sample week arrives, I will already have the meal staples purchased (meats, rice, potatoes, canned tomatoes, oats and fruit for breakfast, etc), and will only have to fill in with the specific foods needed for these particular meals. My shopping list for bulk purchases for the month of February totals $105, so if I average $20 a week to fill in the gaps we will spend about $185 for the month. Giving myself some leeway for things I may have forgotten (and I always forget something!), our family of four will still eat well while spending $200 or less for the month. $200/30 days=$6.67/day for four people, or $1.67/day for each person.

Mickey D's can't beat that! If I add another $100 for household items and paper goods, we will still be at $300 for necessary expenditures, which beats those fast food numbers above by a long shot. Even if you buy more meat, more processed food, or simply don't want to be as detailed in your planning as I am, you should be able to cut your food costs by quite a bit, with just a little forthought as to what you will be eating and what you need to purchase to make those foods.

Note: if you prefer more meat in your menu than our family, and like processed convenience foods, you may want to consider purchasing from Angel Food Ministries, which buys food in bulk and uses a volunteer force to distribute it, so that the cost for the food is extremely low. Each box of food costs $25 and most months the boxes contain an amount of meat worth 1.5 to 2 times that. Families can purchase as many boxes full of food as they would like. If you purchased four boxes and went through the contents of one each week you would still have spent only $100 for the month, and would perhaps need to spend another $100-$150 on breakfast and lunch items.