Category — Health

After rent, food makes up the largest part of our budget every month. In the past we haven’t worried too much about how much we spent at the grocery store, as long as we weren’t buying things that were ridiculously expensive like lobster or filet mignon. But with my wife’s layoff and the subsequent reduction in income, it makes sense for us to start paying attention to the choices we make when shopping, and putting a limit on how much we spend.

There is one major caveat for us though, and that is that quality is a priority. We would rather spend more money on food that’s tasty and healthy rather then spend less money on cheap processed junk food. If organic fruits and vegetables look better, we will buy those. On the other hand, sometimes the organic section is full of half rotten food, in which case we go with the non-organic. We like buying our meat and fish from Whole Foods when we can because the quality tends to be higher than what we can find at the Safeway or Costco in our area.

With that aside, here are the major steps for developing a food budget that you can stick with.

1. The first step is to figure out a monthly budget, then a weekly, and finally a daily. This will be the guide for planning your meals. Say for instance that you want to spend $700 a month on food. If your monthly budget is $700, your weekly budget would work out to $175, and your daily budget would work out to about $25 a day.

Take your daily budget, divide it by the number of meals in a day, and you have the rough cost per meal. In our example above, one meal should be about $8 total. One thing to keep in mind is that not all meals cost the same. I usually eat cereal in the morning, and the cost of milk and cereal for the week breakdown to less than $8 per day (It’s probably closer to $1 a day). This means that some meals, like dinner, can be more expensive than others.

2. Think of menus in 3-day blocks. So start with your daily budget from above, which is $25 a day in our example. Now consider a 3 day block, which is $75 worth of food. Instead of trying to spend the same amount of money every day, balance one expensive meal with two cheap ones.

Suppose you want to have steaks one night. You can balance those out with cheap pasta dishes the other two nights. Eating a nice meal every few nights is good for your budgeting moral, and will hopefully keep your cravings down for a meal at a restaurant, which is likely to be even more expensive than splurging at the grocery store.

3. Buy things on sale. This sounds obvious, but it’s not something we always do. You can buy some foods, like meat and cheese, while they’re on sale, freeze them, and then eat for weeks. So it makes sense to stock up on these things while they’re cheap and use them throughout the month.

Anything that is nonperishable or that can be frozen is ideal for buying in bulk when it’s on sale. Canned goods, pasta, meat, and cereal are just a few ideas.

Also be on the lookout for in-season fruits and vegetables. Not only are they fresher and better tasting, they tend to go on sale more often than out-of-season goods that have been shipped from other countries.

4. Stop eating out and learn to cook at home. For some this is going to be a difficult choice to make, but also one of the biggest ways to save money every week. Go back to your per-meal budget that you figured out in step 1. More than likely eating out, even at a fast food restaurant, will quickly break that limit.

Learning how to cook well is definitely an investment that will pay off over your lifetime, especially if you have kids to feed. It’s worth buying a few key cooking tools and books to get yourself started. They will last forever, and will make the process much easier and more enjoyable. I also recommend sites like Recipezaar and epicurious for finding free recipes when you want to try something new.

Even if you decide to throw together a nice meal it will often be significantly cheaper then it’s restaurant counterpart.

Those are the big things I can think of. If anyone has tips they follow at home I would love to hear them. Feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email and maybe I will create a follow-up to this post.

Book author and speaker Seth Godin has a great article up on his blog asking if Effort is a myth. So many of us look at people who are successful and think they got there through luck or by having special talent. It is rare that we think about the effort that many people put in to get to the top. We are a society of the quick fix. We would rather believe that we can throw money at a problem to fix it instead of putting in the time and effort that is needed to solve the problem.

Think about it. Instead of taking time every day to get out an exercise we spend money on weight loss gimmicks and diets that don’t work. Instead of spending less than we earn and saving money for the future we hope that someone will come along and help us like the lottery or the government. And on a grand scale many believe that the solution for energy independence is spending money to drill in Alaska, rather than taking a few minutes a month to stop by a gas station to put air in our tires.

Seth Godin sums it up in a simple statement:

While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

To help make your own success he recommends the following:

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:
-Exercise for thirty minutes.
-Read relevant non-fiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.)
-Send three thank you notes.
-Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, html coding)
-Volunteer.
-Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
-Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

Imagine if you started following these steps regularly.

First, where could you get 120 minutes from? For most folks giving up television is the obvious choice, and an easy way to get some time back in your day. Some people take public transportation and either sleep on the train or space out and do nothing. Why not bring a work related book or paper along and do some reading on the way? I plan on doing this when I start riding BART, which should get me 30-40 minutes of reading time.

Now what could you do with that extra time each day?

First, taking some time to exercise is a great idea. Studies have shown that regular exercise improves brain functioning as well as improving health and appearance. So get out there!

I also like the idea of reading books, magazines, and blogs that are relevant to what you do, or are relevant to what you would like to do. At my last performance review my boss praised me for having strong industry knowledge versus my peers, as well as being an outside of the box thinker. I think my knowledge comes from the time I take to read and learn new things on a regular basis.

I really do think this comes down to how much you enjoy your job and your industry. If you enjoy computers and work in IT, keeping up with the latest technology will be fun to you and is something that will just happen. If you can’t stand your job it’s likely you won’t want to think about it after you leave. If this is the case I highly recommend you reconsider your career, and spend your time preparing for a new career.

Speaking of preparing for a new career, learning techniques such as MS Excel macros (or advanced Excel in general), keyboard shortcuts, or any other productivity shortcuts can benefit you no matter what job you take (assuming you’re on office worker I guess). And if you hate your career why not start reading up on something that does interest you, and figure out how you can transition into another career?

The last two steps seem like they are a little different in direction at first glance, but they are absolutely essential for success.

If you’re in debt it’s tough to concentrate on work and being productive if you’re worried about how you’re going to pay your bills. Second, if you’re saving everything for a year, you will have a great base to start compounding on for the rest of your life.

Last, it’s always important to spend time with your friends and family. Think of all the movies you’ve seen that had an overworked executive who didn’t spend enough time with his or her kids. You don’t want to be that person do you?

For everyone reading this, I challenge you to look at your time and take advantage of it. For most people, myself included, our careers are our number one asset. It makes sense to work towards a higher salary. Follow these for a year, and see if you don’t end up somewhere better.

Like I said, I think this is a great article, and well worth the read. A big thank you to The Simple Dollar for pointing me to this great article.

There was an interesting editorial piece in the New York Times regarding John McCain’s healthcare plan and what it entails.

A few of my favorite parts :

the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on

So much for cutting taxes. And later in the article:

The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills

We’ve seen lately how well the free market works when regulation is weak, and there’s no doubt regulation would be weak in the healthcare sector.

For comparison purposes, here is another opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal comparing Senator Obama’s plan to Senator McCain’s.

Any thoughts on what matters to you in healthcare reform?

This weekend my wife and I finally made it out to our local farmer’s market. It was fun to walk around and check out the stands, although there wasn’t much to see. A few observations I made.

First, the prices were not as cheap as I thought they would be, and in some cases the prices were higher than at the local Whole Foods. I brought along a small notebook to record the prices we paid for everything. I am going to compare what’s cheap and what’s not so we can focus on buying the cheaper stuff there.

Second, the quality of the fruits and vegetables was very high. This is probably due to the fact that everything was grown locally, so it was fresh and in season. The quality of the food partly makes up for the prices paid, although if something is in season it is likely to be cheap at the grocery store as well.

Last, and something that will make it worth going back every week, was coupons for Whole Foods. Someone was handing out $5 off $25 and gave us two. This is 20% off a $50 purchase, not too shabby. Coupled with finding things on sale, we managed to get a lot of food for a pretty good price.

Overall it was a fun trip for the morning, and definitely something we will try to do every weekend going forward.

It looks like the Corn Refiners Association is starting to fight back against the slew of bad press that high fructose corn syrup has gotten over the past few years. This, coupled with high corn prices thanks to the push for corn-based ethanol, has put a serious dent in the consumption of high fructose corn syrup based foods. I don’t watch much television, but I managed to catch two of their ads this weekend.

And the second ad:

First off, I wouldn’t go out of my way to tell someone how to eat or how they should feed their children (except for now of course, but hey, you could stop reading right now if you wanted). But in my opinion high fructose corn syrup is something to stay away from.
In case you ever find yourself in this situation, here are a few of the problems associated with high fructose corn syrup:

1. High fructose corn syrup does not trigger the “I’m full” response in our body. Think about the last time someone baked cookies or brownies and you ate too many. Did you feel sick afterwords? That is your body telling you that too much sugar is bad for you. But how often do you feel like that after drinking a huge amount of high fructose corn syrup sweetened soda or eating a ton of Oreos? From The Seattle Times:

Fructose adds to overeating because it does not trigger chemical messengers that tell the brain the stomach is full and no longer hungry, like food and drinks that contain regular refined sugar do.

So besides the fact that sugar is bad for you, consuming foods sweetened with hfcs does not actually satisfy a sweet tooth the same way sugar does.

2. It is generally found only in the United States, where excessive lobbying has decreased the cost of corn to an artificial low, and the tariffs on sugar has increased the cost of sugar for food producers.

3. It is not “all natural.” All natural implies that you could go outside and find it. High fructose corn syrup is a processed food, and is thus unnatural.

In fact the FDA has said specifically that high fructose corn syrup is not natural:

The use of synthetic fixing agents in the enzyme preparation, which is then used to produce HFCS, would not be consistent with our (…) policy regarding the use of the term ‘natural’

Again, not my business what parents do, but I wouldn’t want my children eating excessive amounts of processed foods.

4. High fructose corn syrup is everywhere. The amount of products that use high fructose corn syrup is staggering. A partial list can be found over at the Accidental Hedonist website. It’s interesting to see how many foods that are not considered ’sweet’ have high fructose corn syrup in them, probably as a perservative. Wheat Thins, Salad Dressing, and Oscar Myers Lunchables are standouts for having hidden sugar content.

Both commercials use the line “fine in moderation,” but thanks to high fructose corn syrup being so ubiquitous it’s easy for the average shopper to consume too much,.

I think the majority of the backlash against high fructose corn syrup isn’t necessarily due to it being unhealthy for you (although thats part of it). The backlash comes from the fact that consumers are given little choice in whether they consume it or not. In situations where you do have a choice, such as natural sugar sodas, the all-natural sugar alternative tends to be more expensive.

How does this affect you?

What you eat fuels your body and affects your health. Health care costs keep getting higher and form a significant portion of most senior’s budgets, so it makes sense to eat a healthy diet now to save money later. Food expenses also tend to be a significant part of most family’s budgets, so it’s important to make smart choices when you shop. Cutting out processed foods, sugary sodas, and candies is an easy way to save money.

If you have kids keeping them away from excessive amounts of sugar should be common sense, whether it comes from corn or if it comes from sugar cane.

If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about high fructose corn syrup, here are a few links to check out:

The Mayo Clinic

Wikipedia

Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: And Eater’s Manifesto, has an article from Time Magazine on the six rules for eating wisely.

The rules:

1. Don’t eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

2. Avoid foods containing high-fructose corn syrup

3. Spend more, eat less

4. Pay no heed to the nutritional science or health claims on packages

5. Shop at the farmer’s market

6. How you eat is as important as what you eat

So these are the rules to think about when we buy food and eat, but how are they for saving money?

#1, #4, #5 and #6 are steps that are likely to save you money. #2, avoiding HFCS, might actually be bad for the budget, since high-fructose corn syrup is cheap compared to sugar. On the other hand cutting these things out will save you money if you don’t replace them with sugary equivalents. Soda, for instance, is a big place to cut back on HFCS and save some money.

#3 is obviously telling you spend more right? Maybe not. If you reduce the volume of your food consumption enough, you might be able to overcome the expense of eating healthy food. Also keep in mind the long term costs of eating poor food, as the author notes in the health care spending stats.

While my wife and I work on our food budgeting, we will keep these rules in mind. If you’ve been thinking about changing up the way you eat, these rules are a good place to start. Another place to look if you want some recipes is Tosca Reno’s Clean Eating Diet Cookbook. I love many of the recipes in there, and I feel like the clean eating principles are very practical for a long term solution, and fall right into line with Michael Pollen’s advice, especially rule #1.