WKNC's Money Talks

Akhil Mitta 0:00
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of WKNC Money talks a financial literacy podcast run by your host or kilometer. And in this episode, we're going to talk about food, the ones that kill you. So this episode is all about how we spend our money, in terms of having food, eating out, eating, in grocery shopping, things like that. So have you ever had a fancy meal out in a restaurant and then you realize, oh, wait, you spent about $100 for one steak and one tiramisu dessert. Now, of course, this is something you'd like to do every once in a while, but you got to learn how to start saving your money when it comes to food. Now I understand everyone wants to have that Starbucks every day, or they want to have some kind of frozen food here and there. But sometimes it's very essential to know what to spend your money on for food and what not to. So I've talked with a few of my friends in terms of what they're doing in terms of spending food. And it's a wide variety of answers. It always depends on the person you're talking to. One could be very budget conscious, and another person could be splurging every single day, because that's just how they like it because food is their love language. And that is totally understandable. For example, one of my friends, she only spends around $300 a month, but she only eats in and she only eats out once a month. Whereas there are some of my friends who eat out once a week, so four times a month and eat very less inside. And this is a real problem when it comes to expenditures. Because this is what can kill you eating inside may cost X amount of money. But eating outside also costs a different amount of money. Now we're going to dive into the costs associated with eating out let's say we eat out every single day, versus eating in every single day. Let's start with some popular dishes that people like to make at home. One example of it could be chicken and rice. Now chicken and rice is probably one of the most famous things you've probably seen on tick tock Instagram, wherever it is you're scrolling through chicken and rice is probably the easiest meals you can make at home. And of course, it's tempting to try and cook that yourself. But we're going to compare the costs of if we're eating that outside versus doing it in our home. So let's just do some quick research here PF Changs chicken and rice costs $8. Whereas when you make it at home, it can cost more money to buy the chicken by the rice and all the vegetables you may need. But you get more servings and less cost per portion of food that you eat. Also, it's healthy, it's freshly made, you know there's no preservatives, you don't have to eat food that's probably been sitting out for a while now. Because that's just how restaurants are sometimes another thing that we can talk about is reducing our expenses on coffee. Now I know there's a lot of people out there who enjoy having coffee outside whichever coffee place it may be. However, it is significantly cheaper to make your coffee at home every single day. And I'm sorry, you've probably heard this on 20,000. Real 20,000 tech talks about making money. They say the first thing is saving money. And the first thing you got to do is stop getting that coffee every single day. And in all honesty, yes, let's say you spend $5 a day it becomes $150 a month you can buy the same thing, well, probably not the same thing you can work on improving the craft and probably buying a few things here and there to make sure you get it exactly how you want it in the coffee shop. But the same thing will cost around 10 to 20 bucks a month. And that goes a long way. Especially if you're a college student looking to save that money. That money that you just saved 120 $130 can go elsewhere like investments, or honestly you can go out to a nice meal instead. Now the concept of eating in has become very popularized recently due to a lot of factors such as social media influence, and also the fact that not many people know how to cook but there are companies who give you meal kits that lets you prepare by yourself. Now I'd say there are a few stages in terms of how far you can go to cooking in and let's get into that. Let's see what are the different stages of cooking in and how the deeper down you go, the more money you can save. We'll start off with the meal kit meal kits often have ingredients and an exact recipe to follow. It's easy, you know exactly what to do. And you know the food will come out delicious. But you're paying an insane amount of premium. Just to have these mailboxes sent to you every week an estimate of how much HelloFresh which is one of the most popular meal kit companies would cost for getting food once a week. eight servings worth of food once a week is $90. That's just eight servings, which means only one meal of the day like this is just your lunch every single day for the rest of the week. And that's $90 multiply that by two assuming you're going to have some dinner that's 180 bucks a week and that is way more expensive than it needs to be on average. We spend around $200 per month on grocery shopping and we get to have a wide variety of dishes and things we can do ourselves. Like I'm not even kidding you the fact that they charge you $90 For eight servings that's like $10 a dish you're better off going outside and eating something for $10 per day.

They make you do all the work that to ensure the packaging looks pretty sharp, the recipes are something nice to keep. But the most important thing is you're spending a lot of money because you think that, oh, this is healthy, and they have all the ingredients. For me, I don't need to worry about shopping. But you will slowly start to realize that maybe doing meal kits are not the best idea because of the fact that while it does keep your shopping and it does give you a recipe, you're going to spend a lot more money than you intended. Now the next thing we're going to dive into is frozen meals, frozen meals. We all love it college students. Of course, we all love the frozen meals, it's the easiest thing to do, pop it in the microwave, or finished pop it in the oven, we're finished, no prep work required. There are a lot of disadvantages to this. And the first thing is the quality of the food because you're going to have preservatives, and you're going to have these items that were frozen and processed intensely. And they won't feel as fresh. However, it does get you through the day. And of course over time, there's evidence to believe that if you eat frozen food too much, you're going to start to have problems. And I think this is pretty much a given for anyone that if you eat frozen foods, and if your life depends on frozen foods, it's not going to turn out well for you in the future. Now in terms of cost, there are definitely some frozen food meals that cost $5 or $6. For example, I myself am guilty of this, I buy a chicken rice bowl that's frozen with some vegetables, beans, it's beautiful, honestly, but it's also not healthy. But it's also $5. So I'll take it, you know, I'll take what I can get, it's an easy thing to do just heat it up in the microwave for four minutes and unset. But you will still realize that you can save even more when you cook yourself and you grocery shop yourself. And so we dive in deeper yet again, we're

going down this rabbit hole so much first thing is grocery shopping, the way you grocery shop is really dependent on where you shop to begin with. So you can shop at Trader Joe's or you can shop at Harris Teeter or you can shop at food line all these places have one thing that's distinctively different, you pay a premium food line, maybe the lowest parasit or maybe the middle and Trader Joe's might might be the high end things. And of course, this depends on your price. So I could spend $100 a month at something like food line or Dollar General but get low quality items, or spend $300 a month and get high quality items from Trader Joe's. And this is of course, depending on your financing your budgeting, depending on how much you want to spend for groceries, you can make a good estimate and decide which shop works out best for you. Now, in terms of cooking meals more often than not most dishes that you make will cost two to $3. My average that was made from this is based on my own personal experience. I live in wolf village and I cook a lot at home. That's pretty much my only source of food, I don't have a meal plan or anything like that, I spend around 250 to $300 a month on groceries. It's highly dependent I'm trying to reduce it's only because I'm spoiling myself a little bit with the frozen meals and a little bit more premium products, I only spend around two to $3 per meal. And more often than not, I make excessive amount of food, which lasts me for days. So I can make a breakfast item that lasts me for four to five days just because that's how much of a quantity it gives me. So if we compare these numbers, let's compare these numbers. Okay, we're gonna say we spend $300 A month we're gonna get our coffee, we're gonna get a daily breakfast, lunch, dinner and hell, we can even get some snacks in there. There's some sweet things, there's a bunch of different things that you'd like to eat, you can munch on, all of that costs $300 a month. Let's assume someone does a mix of all these different things. They're going to eat out twice a week. Let's say they eat out Friday and Saturday. They have a HelloFresh meal box that comes in two times a week. And they also have Starbucks every other day. That's a safe estimate for someone who may be eating out a lot more than eating in HelloFresh costs $60 for two meals per week, Starbucks will cost you your $150 every month, assuming you get a five $6 latte or something like that. But you know, it's October, it's nearing October. Now. If you get your pumpkin spice latte, that's like $7.07 eight bucks. As you mean you have it every day close to 200 bucks, let's say and you get like a snack every once in a while with your order. Eating out let's assume you eat at a variety of restaurants. We're gonna take examples from restaurants on Hillsborough Street. One can be Coco Bongo, one can be hibachi and one can be Chipotle. Let's say Coco Bongo may average you on $30 hibachi may average you on $15. And Chipotle may average you on $8. And if you do the math, assuming you go twice a week, hands eight times a month. And assuming we have the three restaurants here at eight around $50 For the three restaurants which means around 100 120 $130. So 120 plus 60. That's 180 plus 200. That's $380. Now that's an insane amount of money. And this is all just assuming you have one or two meals a day I didn't even include the fact that you're going to be cooking at home or eating out anymore. This is purely just things that you add Add or sprinkle on top of your existing eating in habits, you're still going to go out and have that coffee, you're still going to go out and have that meal every once in a while. And you're still going to go out this is all on top of your existing purchases you assume you get at a grocery store. And that my friends is where the money really starts to go away. Eating out is far more expensive than you think. And you can save so much by eating so enough about eating outside versus eating in we all know this. Now, I don't need to lecture you anymore about this. After all, this is just a podcast about saving money. And we're going to talk about a little bit about the psychology behind why it appears that you spend more money when you're outside versus inside. So to begin with, we're gonna talk about the way you pay. So a lot of people out here use Apple pay Google Pay, or just a card. And the thing is, the way this works is, if you cannot see it, it doesn't feel like you spent it and that becomes a real issue when all you see is numbers on your screen. But in reality, when you're tapping to pay, you don't really see anything deduct from your bank balance until a few minutes later, or you don't really see the money actually growing. And this is one of the times where I actually vouch for cash to be used. Because in that case, you're going to see physical money being moved out of your hand into someone else's hand. And that's 100% going to make you feel more conscious about how you spend your money. Now of course, we've talked about eating and eating out psychology behind spending the money now how do you actually start saving now I want to switch we want to switch to eating in we want to save money here. So the first thing would be of course, reduce the amount of times you get coffee outside reduce the amount of times you eat outside, you could still go out with friends every once in a while just reduce it instead of two meals a week be it once a week. Instead of Starbucks every day Starbucks every three days, it makes a big difference in the long run. The next thing could possibly be to get loyalty programs, discount codes, vouchers, coupons, there's a whole other business behind all those and that can probably be talked about in a later episode. But there's a lot of factors that can that can go into saving so much money at grocery stores that it's insane. There's a whole whole fandom around saving money on coupons and a whole fandom around discounts some better things to do is between planters roasted cashews and normal cashews planter costs $15. normal costs $5 Take the normal unless the brand really makes a big difference on how you eat you're not going to notice the difference in the actual end product. If you're making pasta sauce with cashews don't buy planners, there's no need to buy planners, you can just buy the normal cashews, and that really save a lot of money at racks up over time. So with all of that being said, I hope you all make some more conscious decisions on how you eat and I hope you start to eat more healthy by eating in more often. I hope you save a lot more money and that can go towards paying your car insurance or paying your rent or honestly just saving up for the future because trust me in the long run this is going to be so worth it. There are so many more ways to save money and this is just one of the avenues where you can make a conscious decision to start saving money. Thank you guys so much for listening and I will see you in the next one.