Just did the math on my 2025 spending so far and I’m honestly embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I’ve spent more money on food delivery, dining out, fast food, and restaurants (groceries NOT included) than I’ve spent on rent in a high COL city.
That means I’ve literally eaten through more cash than the roof over my head. This has been a huge wake-up call and I need to learn how to develop better habits or I will be homeless.
For those who’ve successfully cut down food spending:
What practical tips or systems worked best for you to fully commit yourself to making better financial decisions and living frugally? How do you build discipline to actually follow through on home cooking when life gets busy?
For background I am in my late 20s, single, with no children. Make a great income but I really have no significant savings due to my spending habits.
I've spent more money on eating out/food delivery(excluding groceries) than I have on rent this year. What. Am. I. Doing.
byu/Competitive_Ease5651 inFrugal
Posted by Competitive_Ease5651
47 Comments
Learn to cook. Its not just about giving up eating out, but creating good alternatives
Every Sunday, make a big pot of food and meal prep. I like lentil curry and chili. Also buy a few frozen pizzas and hamburgers/buns to eat on days that you don’t feel like cooking. It may seem unhealthy, but it’s actually much healthier than eating out.
#1 is meet yourself where you are at: good freezer foods bought on sale are certainly cheaper than eating out. Start out getting the good stuff: screaming Sicilian pizza, raos lasagna, pot stickers, whatever you tend to crave. Keep an eye out for sales and stock up. Then if you want to dine out, try to convince yourself to pick a tasty frozen meal instead.
Learn to cook and keep frozen pizzas in your freezer. Whenever I REALLY don’t want to cook I pop a frozen pizza in the oven (a cheap cheese pizza, I add my own toppings). What did your grocery bill look like? I spend the most on eating out and take out when I’m not buying enough groceries
Get stuff you like to eat, even easy things just to get started. Bagged salad mixes are an easy example… one of those, some bread on the side (pick a nice one), and you can have a lunch with minimal effort. For extra protein, pick up a rotisserie chicken once or twice a week, pull the chicken when you get home, and throw it in the fridge. You can add it to any meal. Breakfast is super easy with instant oatmeal and some tea bags or coffee brewed at home. Dinner can get started easily with ready-to-heat kind of meals (again, just a starting point) that are found at Costco etc.
First, stop doing food delivery, biggest scam ever.
I spent 400 dollars eating out in july and I cut that down to around 100 by eating at the Costco food court everyday. You can do the same.
I think you know the answer, you just aren’t committed to following through. This isn’t rocket science, after all. What if the lunch you would normally buy is sitting in your fridge in Tupperware? I’d recommend getting the NYT Cooking app, select what you’d want for lunch, and spend a Sunday evening meal prepping. If you don’t want to have the same thing all week then select 2 dishes and meal prep Thurs/Friday lunch on Wednesday evening. I love not having to think about lunch during the week because all I have to do is grab a Tupperware from the fridge and off I go – all thanks to relatively minimal planning that is done on Sunday
Come up with a list of 5-10 meals you like (or would like) to make. Go buy enough groceries/ingredients to make 3 servings of each meal. Commit to making all of those meals and eating the left overs without letting anything go bad. If that is overwhelming, start with a smaller menu and build over time to prevent boredom.
Still treat yourself to 1-3 meals out max per week. You will come to find those as being special. Right now eating out is not special at all for you.
Good for you for figuring that out! I would begin by thinking about what dining out/delivery means to you – is it a treat? Convenience? Food you don’t know how to prepare yourself? Then attack it from that angle. And also think about what a successful change might look like. Dining out/delivery once a week? Taking a lunch M-F? Set a goal and reassess at Christmas.🎅
Something I learned about myself was that fast food drive thrus make me feel like I’m nineteen again, which I am most definitely not lol.
I saw this same metric last month. Insane.
small 5 cubic ft deep freezer and a vacuum sealer and a canning set. I have one in an apartment and when empty are light enough for two people to carry without issue up multiple flights of stairs.
i also have a standalone pantry that i bring with me to new apartments. most small apt have almost no real storage space for bulk foods.
normally the dining space of the apt is converted into a pantry as my partner and I don’t really eat at the table. maybe if I have enough space one day.
I make a number of meals ×2 when I have the time and willpower to cook and vacuum seal them so I can easily reheat later. this lets me keep variety when life is busy.
I have like 6 months of primary proteins frozen, and get 1/4 cow every couple years. I have about 4 weeks worth of meals prepped and frozen.
once fall hits and root veggies are fresh I’ll take two of the frozen chickens I have bought when on sale then roast and make chicken broth. this will be then turned into white chicken chilli, chicken tortellini and chicken noodle soup etc then canned and sealed for the winter.
I have about 25 onion and pepper packets sealed and frozen to be able to be grabbed as an ingredient.
I make my own pesto (marginal cost savings but I like the process).
casseroles are great for freezing and reheating.
I buy and separate large packs of bacon and other items into separate packaging to use individually vs buying small packs from the store for more money overall.
the biggest thing is just think ahead. make sure you have a lot of the core ingredients ready.
You really need to work with your habits, or you’re just going to set yourself up to fail.
How many times a month do you go out to dinner?
How many times a month do you order in because you are too tired from work to cook?
Do you buy expensive beverages every day? How many times a day?
Allow yourself a bucket of money for each one of these things. So if you want to set aside $200 a month for eating out every month – stick to that. Then give yourself another $200 for quick bites/ordering in/daily beverages.
Use cash if you have to.
Don’t cut eating out immediately. It might be too soon if you really like it or if you used it as a coping mechanism for something. Instead, try to eat out 3 times a month at first and reduce even that (if necessary).
The rest of the time, find the recipes of your favourite dishes you eat out and try to make them at home, exactly like they are at the restaurant.
This worked for me as once I made them exactly like the ones out (or even better), eating out at some places lost its magic. Now I just go out for something I can’t make better.
I think there are a lot of people in this situation.
When you order takout or something, what are you ordering? Is it pizza? Because pizza is real easy to do! Or find the recipe of what you are eating usualy and make it at home. From there, you’ll learn few tricks and discover what you like to eat and cook.
Spending money on fast food is very addictive. Sometimes, I’d get fast food meals on my way home just cause I could. I started solely carrying my driver’s license and leaving my money at home. That helped me curb the habit of spending so much, but I suggest making a budget and sticking to it. You could also plan out what you’re going to eat on a weekly basis. You don’t have to commit to quitting “junk”. You can still get frozen products and air fry them. And for those busy nights, you could either make a bigger meal the night before for leftovers or keep a bag of quick and easy meals in your freezer or pantry.
Learn to cook. Start with easy recipes. Write shopping lists based on what is on sale. Meal plan. Keep organised. Embrace leftovers. Learn about nextovers. Have back up plans so you don’t order out. These can be frozen leftovers or frozen meals you can add frozen vegetables or a salad to. You can do it.
I’m in a similar boat. Historically Ive had crazy high spending in the eating out category. If you don’t use a budgeting app I’d highly recommend getting started with that! I started using one a few months ago and it’s been SO helpful. You just have to link your bank accounts and spend a little time setting it all up with stuff like your financial goals but after that it’s all pretty automated (I am not naming the app since I know my comment otherwise sounds like an ad lol). It’s really forced me to look honestly at my budget and it’s feeling a lot easier to make better choices with all that info in hand.
It’s been a BIG reality check, and it feels a bit like a game to reduce my unnecessary or misguided spending over time.
It happens, the important part is that you’ve noticed the trend and can correct it. As many others have said and will say, cook from home find things that you enjoy making, and make things that you enjoy eating out.
Getting fat I’d imagine
I literally wrote a note and kept it on my fridge reminding me not to eat fast food. It was a reminder that the food is never that satisfying/satiating and the time it takes to drive to the closest restaurant, wait for food, and drive home could be spent cooking a better meal. And that the money spent could buy ingredients for more than one meal.
I also get recipes off of budgetbytes. They’re easy and tasty. I keep some frozen stuff just for those lazy AF days though
Drastically reduce how often you do food delivery, dining out, fast food, and restaurants and do your own cooking, make your own lunches for work. If you are going to coffee shops to buy coffee, reduce often you do that.
The tip is to meal plan.
When I’m hungry it’s too late to cook.
I’m not great at it, but I know that’s the solution.
for something you will likely do 50,000 times it is important to learn to cook. We all can become experts at cooking.
Thank you for your service 🙏
Learn how to cook. Learn so that it’s fun, therapeutic, social, and enjoyable! A few channels I dig on YouTube:
– Frugal, Fit Mom (I’m not a mom, but love her humor and think her meal preps are fun)
– Brian Lagerstrom (former chef teaching regular folks how to make great food)
– Ian Fujimoto (his shorts are a hoot!)
– Julia Pacheco (cooking for a family on a budget)
– Acre Homestead (legit meal prepping)
Good luck!
Those costs from eating out grow quickly.
I try to limit eating out to once every week or two.
Otherwise, find foods you like that you are able to make, and eat them the majority of the time. Eating out less saves a ton of money in the long run.
Start small, and make it easy to make the right decisions. Cannot emphasize that latter part enough: the less willpower you have to use, the easier it’s going to be to stick to it.
Obviously the ideal would be to make most of your food yourself, but cooking from scratch and managing your kitchen is a skill that takes time to learn, and you’re probably going to suck at it at first. Just like with any other skill, you don’t want to immediately leap into the deep end. Start with the easy stuff and gradually increase the difficulty.
Start by just replacing some of your eating out with convenience foods that you cook at home – grab some boxes of chicken nuggets, frozen pizzas, frozen hash browns, pasta and sauce, or whatever it is you already eat. Even the higher quality stuff is often *much* cheaper than their fast food or restaurant equivalents (and sometimes tastes better).
It’s much easier to avoid the temptation of eating out if you have convenient food at home that you enjoy eating.
From there, start expanding to less processed foods and easy recipes. Look for reputable recipe sources (well-known blogs or book publishers – there’s a lot of crap out there that hasn’t actually been tested by anyone other than the one home cook who developed the recipe, and AI-generated recipes that haven’t been tested by anyone at all are becoming more and more common), and don’t be afraid to experiment!
Delete the apps.
Get yourself a slow cooker!
A lot of people make that mistake. I’ve estimated peoples food expenses before just for them to look at me like I’m an idiot then when they take an honest look its more than I estimated. I have helped multiple people with spending and varying amounts of debt if you want to chat. Its turned into a hobby that should be a business including being the treasurer of a non profit
You gotta learn to love cooking. Maybe try finding some cooking shows you enjoy to get ideas. If you can find a way to watch Alton Brown’s old show Good Eats, that’s a great, entertaining show that is also super educational. There are some good YouTube channels as well such as Food Wishes
Also, nobody has time to cook a nice scratch meal every night. Cook in large batches and reheat. Make soups and freeze some. Keep pasta and a variety of sauces (or ingredients to make sauce) on hand so you can whip something up. Etc
Allow yourself once a week or whatever you decide and stick to it
Consider a meal delivery service.
My household did hello fresh for several years and while the quality consistency wasn’t always there but as pretty experienced cooks, we were introduced to some new dishes and still retained some pretty neat tricks that we learned through the service.
I think the minimum serving size would be two people on some of them, but they’re standard amount of 10 oz of meat was a little on the slim side for us.
The quality issues were typically with vegetables not being the freshest, a couple of times we received some potatoes that were inedible. But overall, it was good enough to keep us hooked for several years.
Give yourself a monthly budget for eating out and put the cash in a Ziploc bag. This way when it’s gone, it’s gone.
I found myself actually starting to have more money left over at the end of the month over time.
I cook myself.
But that can get quite expensive as well.
However. I started doing keto diet in combination with One Meal A Day (OMAD).
I eat way less now, and that reflects back on my wallet.
You’re addicted to convenience, and hyper palatable foods.
Hard addiction to break TBH.
Food prep can be fun and save a lot of money.
Having a meal prep service or personal chef is not as expensive as you may think. Not everyone can learn to cook sustainably for themselves – there are lots of factors in why this has become a habit for you. Just something to consider. I’d look into what services your area has to offer. Best of luck
Homie, just go pick it up.
Do you like to cook? That helps. It sounds like you have disposable income or you wouldn’t be able to eat out so much. Take some of that $$$ and take a cooking class. Having a few great dishes in your repertoire helps.
What do you eat out or order in that you like the most? Find a recipe online and try making it yourself – it might taste way better if you cook it yourself.
Practical tip to save money is to find a Trader Joe’s and buy some soups, salads and frozen items you can eat in a pinch. And then plan to cook something once or twice a week. Designate one night for eating out – not 5, lol. Ask your friends if they’d like to start doing things like meeting for a walk ima park instead of eating/drinking all the time.
Not cooking
I am so glad I came of age before all of this food delivery bullshit. I’ve literally never used it and I have no desire. I actually like going to the store, finding values and bargains, coming up with meals on the fly based on what’s on sale. My family eats very well but none of us are particularly fat because we don’t eat a lot of processed gross food
You gotta learn how to cook. In the best case you have decades left on this earth. You shorten that lifespan eating highly processed garbage and salty takeout. Food is fuel.
I only allow 250$ a week into checking, everything else automatically goes to a different bank in a HYSA. I don’t check this bank nor have a card attached to it. That $250 I have to MAKE last me for bills, groceries, gas, rent, insurance, necessities, etc. I have to get creative sometimes. I try save as much of it as possible so I can pay larger bills when they come due
What food do you enjoy, really enjoy? Learn to make that. Identify recipes that will allow you to batch cook.
Don’t be a perfectionist. Let yourself take short cuts, e.g. buy frozen pizza or premade sauces or marinades etc.
Concentrate on one thing at a time. For now you are concentrating on eating more homemade food. You can add in cheaper supermarkets or more veggies or less salt etc, later.
Make it easy to do the thing you want and difficult to do the things you don’t want. So have food ready to go, use phone reminders to take things out the freezer, get an air fryer or get the spice mix you need. Uninstall the delivery apps from your phone, unsubscribe to email offers, text offers etc.
When you do cook at home, congratulate yourself. Track your progress, maybe a counter how often you cook at home per week, reflect on home much you’ve saved.
How much of a foodie are you?
In general groceries will be cheaper than eating out almost always. Even if it’s not true 100% of the time, that habit alone will help a ton.
I find freezer food (if it’s not unappealing to you) to be clutch for situations I don’t feel like cooking. Costco breakfast burritos chicken bakes etc.
If you do live near a Costco, pre made (or nearly pre made) meals are also great especially as a transitional thing. Even if it’s more expensive than from scratch, it’s still cheaper than eating out.
Then, cooking. Start small if it’s not a habit for you. Pick 1-2 recipes per week. Try to use ingredients you already have as inspiration.