Cheap Meal Plan: How to Eat Well on $20 a Week
When people ask me how I save so much money, they never believe how simple the answer is. Simply cooking your meals at home has such a profound impact on your budget that it has to be the number one way to cut costs without sacrificing anything. By simply cooking more meals, you will save absolutely hundreds of dollars per month. Depending on your habit, you can even save more than hundreds of dollars per week. You don’t even realize that on an average day, where all you get is a fast food meal and a Starbucks in the morning, you’ve already spent $10 on horrible food. That’s already $300 a month. Do you understand where I’m getting at with this?
Here are a few things you NEED to pick up and get to work in your kitchen. These are staples that can be used to create thousands of different recipe ideas and help you learn how to be a better cook:
eggs
bread
Oil (sunflower, vegetable)
Rice
Pasta
Canned beans
Various spices (salt, pepper, a few others)
tomato sauce/paste
Meat that is ON SALE
Vegetables that are ON SALE
For breakfast (God forbid you wake up 5-10 minutes early) you can make dozens of things with eggs. Overeasy, scrambled, poached, 500 different tortillas, with bread, alone, etc.
For lunch you can make pasta, rice, chicken/turkey sandwiches, anything, and you can take it with you to work.
For dinner, pasta and rice combined with various meats, vegetables, and spices can be combined into thousands of dinner ideas. For specific recipes, just google “chicken dish” or “cook with rice.” It’s not complicated: there are hundreds of recipes that are almost impossible to screw up, even for virgin cooks.
Some of these meals will only cost you 50 cents when you look at the ingredients. Rice is very cheap and a staple food all over the world, but it is neglected in the West. The possibilities are endless. Believe it or not, you can eat well for less than 3 dollars a day. If you get a drink from Starbucks in the morning, have lunch somewhere, and then grab something for dinner (or make a frozen meal), you’re spending close to $15-20 without realizing it. It’s $600 a month. How much can you save? You do the calculations. I recently included a good friend and my sister in this plan, and they are paying their rent with the difference.