Cutting down on your food expenses is one of the easiest ways to save extra money each month.

In this blog post we’ll use some eating habits that we believe are about normal for a single adult living and working in the US. Then, we’ll show how you can save nearly $100 each week by simply doing a better job of buying and cooking your own food. Everyone is different and your daily habits might not fall in line with the example but we hope you can take some of these ideas and apply it to your situation.

Breakfast:

This is a savings of $4.30 per day. If you don’t want to purchase a coffee maker, there are good and inexpensive alternatives for making a single cup such as the Aeropress or a french press. The cheapest solution would be to use instant coffee.

Lunch:

This is a savings of $4.65 per day. While microwavable meals may seem cheap and easy, we don’t recommend them because they usually aren’t that filling and are generally not that healthy. Another great way to cut your lunch costs even more is to eat leftovers.

Snacks:

This is a savings of $0.50 per day. Another alternative is to eat your lunch gradually throughout the afternoon so you don’t have to purchase additional food for snacking.

Dinner:

This is a savings of around $10 per day. The added benefit is you now have 2-3 extra meals for lunches or dinners later in the week. If you already eat dinner at home try to plan and cook meals that will last several days instead of buying a frozen dinner that will only last you one meal.

Adding all of this up will save you $19.45 per day. Over the course of a 5 day work week this will save you just shy of $100 per week. You can increase the amount saved by spending a couple hours once per week making a lot of food that you can refrigerate or freeze and then eat throughout the week. Investing in a slow cooker and making a hearty stew or slow cooking some meat and then pairing that with some rice and veggies makes for a filling and extremely cheap meal.

If you need to eat out at a restaurant, you can always save a couple of dollars by ordering water instead of a soda.

We recommend setting up your Spending Categories to really drill down into where your food spending is going. If you’re already categorizing all of your expenses then the next step is to set a budget for both your eating out and your groceries and work on spending less money eating out and shift that over to groceries where every dollar you spend goes much farther.

If you’ve changed your eating habits and have noticed the changes in your budgets, we’d love for you to share your experience in the comments!