RPF0359-Ketura_Free_Interview
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:03.600 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:08.520 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:12.040 | My guest today is Keturah Free.
00:00:13.800 | Keturah is a personal finance blogger and she's a wife and mother.
00:00:19.160 | And today she's here to share some of her experience and some of her knowledge and insight
00:00:24.920 | into how you can save money by learning to more effectively cook at home.
00:00:30.080 | Keturah, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.
00:00:31.520 | Thank you.
00:00:32.520 | Thanks for having me.
00:00:33.520 | So I've invited you on, secret society of Radical Personal Finance guests, to talk today
00:00:41.160 | about meal planning and meal preparation.
00:00:44.240 | I know this is something that you care a lot about, you write a lot about on your website,
00:00:47.920 | freetocook.com.
00:00:48.920 | And I'd love for you to start though by simply sharing your story.
00:00:54.280 | What's your personal story as it relates to money?
00:00:58.480 | Our personal story is I am a mother of four.
00:01:04.160 | My husband and I, a handful of years ago, we were kind of doing what we like to call
00:01:12.200 | hot bunking where my husband...
00:01:15.280 | That's a military term.
00:01:17.680 | I like it.
00:01:18.680 | Yes, yes.
00:01:20.000 | My husband worked nights and I worked during the day.
00:01:23.040 | So our bed was constantly hot from someone being in there.
00:01:29.600 | That made it very difficult for us to have good quality family time.
00:01:38.280 | So a lot of times, we would just kind of do whatever.
00:01:42.680 | But the days that he was off, it was really important for us to have family meal time.
00:01:52.400 | A while back, we had read some stuff from a therapist that had kind of talked about
00:01:58.240 | how family meal time is actually very beneficial.
00:02:02.920 | Not only does it save you money from eating at home instead of eating out, but just that
00:02:10.600 | you have a lot of psychological benefits from eating as a family.
00:02:16.080 | So that's kind of how we started things.
00:02:19.840 | Obviously, we like to save money by eating at home as well.
00:02:28.680 | And then recently, within the last year, we have decided that it's going to be more beneficial
00:02:35.800 | for our family for me to be a stay-at-home mom and also blog instead of working outside
00:02:42.360 | of the home.
00:02:43.360 | So that also kind of worked with our budget and all of that to try and keep a lot of our
00:02:50.440 | meals in our house.
00:02:52.840 | So.
00:02:53.840 | Were you always good at, like in the time that both of you guys were working, were you
00:02:57.440 | good at saving money and eating at home or was this a transformation of some kind that
00:03:02.160 | you went through?
00:03:04.480 | I would say we were starting to eat out a lot just because life gets busy and instead
00:03:14.920 | of spending that time at home, it was just, "Oh, well, that was so much easier to do this
00:03:20.280 | as we were taking the kids from here or there or running to the next place."
00:03:24.680 | A lot of times for my husband and I, we would go out to lunch a lot since that was kind
00:03:29.560 | of like his in-between time of where he was going to work and I was, at least I was
00:03:34.440 | off for lunch.
00:03:35.440 | So we would kind of do a lot of the out to eat for lunch, which is not a whole lot more
00:03:41.440 | expensive or less expensive to tell you the truth.
00:03:44.000 | So we were still spending a lot of money doing that kind of stuff.
00:03:48.400 | Did you track since you started making a focused effort to eat at home more, did you track
00:03:55.360 | the difference that that made in your family budget by any chance?
00:03:59.960 | You know, I don't think we did like a huge like, "This is how much we're saving each
00:04:06.960 | month," because our family, we had also added on two children in that time frame.
00:04:13.840 | So it's kind of hard to figure out because we're not really comparing apples to apples
00:04:17.640 | at that point.
00:04:19.840 | But I would say, you know, more recently, we were at least going out to eat one night
00:04:28.040 | a week as a family.
00:04:29.840 | Give or take, we were even going to like Chick-fil-A and stuff like that.
00:04:33.240 | Well, even with our family of six, going to Chick-fil-A is $35.
00:04:38.240 | So $35 times four in a month, we're still spending $130, $140 give or take just to go
00:04:49.880 | out to Chick-fil-A once a week.
00:04:53.640 | So for us, we're at least saving that much.
00:04:56.720 | Yeah.
00:04:57.720 | What do you do to encourage other people to eat at home more?
00:05:03.560 | I personally make a weekly menu.
00:05:07.520 | I put that on my blog each week just to kind of help encourage others to eat at home.
00:05:17.800 | A lot of my menus include recipes that I've already had on the blog.
00:05:24.160 | So it's kind of like, "Here's something that you can make along with me."
00:05:29.160 | And when I'm making my menus each week, I base it off of our weekly ad and we shop at
00:05:35.960 | Publix.
00:05:36.960 | So I just go on there and make our meals based off of things that they have on sale each
00:05:43.980 | week or if I have things in our pantry that we've gotten in other sales and things like
00:05:51.240 | that.
00:05:52.240 | So that's kind of what I do and then if somebody doesn't like that recipe, we'll put something
00:05:57.760 | else in place.
00:05:58.760 | Publix is the greatest southern treasure that a quarter of the US gets to experience.
00:06:05.360 | Yeah, definitely.
00:06:06.360 | So my wife and I, we always find this area to be challenging and it seems like – we
00:06:14.800 | don't eat out very much.
00:06:15.800 | Generally, if we eat out, it's planned and it's a specific location.
00:06:18.960 | But I still find it – we find it challenging just simply to control the grocery bill.
00:06:22.960 | I often feel when I go through our budget, I'm like, "Man, it just seems like we
00:06:26.240 | shouldn't have to spend as much as we do in this category."
00:06:31.000 | So I'm always looking for ideas and ways that we can get better but it's challenging
00:06:37.200 | because we're all busy and it takes time.
00:06:39.520 | As with anything, it takes time to be proactive, to be ahead of the game in order to make progress
00:06:46.400 | in this area.
00:06:47.680 | When you sit down and look at a sale flyer from the grocery store, how do you convert
00:06:52.800 | that into a menu?
00:06:56.680 | I would say for someone who's just kind of starting out is just to maybe just make
00:07:03.960 | a list of all of the meals that you like.
00:07:08.160 | Now for me, when I first started dating my husband, I kind of made that a challenge where
00:07:16.960 | I did not want to make the same thing for him for a year which that's a little bit
00:07:23.920 | much for most people and that's not to say that I didn't make some of his favorites
00:07:29.320 | every now and then or whatever but that's kind of how I had challenged myself.
00:07:34.440 | The average person though, if you come up with even 30 meals that you can rotate in,
00:07:41.600 | in that way it's pretty easy for you to go through a flyer and say, "Okay, chicken's
00:07:48.000 | on sale.
00:07:49.120 | We like chicken enchiladas," for example.
00:07:54.400 | Then what I can do also with some of my meals that I have posted on the blog, like chicken
00:08:00.760 | enchiladas is a perfect example.
00:08:03.720 | That for our family makes two pans.
00:08:07.160 | I make one tonight and then I freeze the second one so that if we come up short on another
00:08:13.600 | week or whatever the case may be, if I need something quicker where I don't need all
00:08:19.720 | the meal prep, then we can just pull it out and then throw it in the oven and we're
00:08:24.800 | done.
00:08:25.800 | I think that's really helpful too to kind of just have a handful of meals that you can
00:08:30.360 | either make doubles of and it's not really that hard to do that or if you're having
00:08:37.760 | company over and you need those two pans, then you have two pans.
00:08:43.720 | I would say that's probably the big thing for a lot of people is to kind of know what
00:08:49.240 | meals your family likes so that you can kind of rotate them in a month or whatever as you're
00:08:55.600 | looking at the ads.
00:08:57.120 | What's the hardest thing for people who are intentionally focusing on this goal of
00:09:03.120 | eating at home more?
00:09:04.120 | What's the hardest, what's the biggest complaint that people have, the biggest thing
00:09:07.660 | they find difficult to make this transition?
00:09:10.760 | I would say that it's time.
00:09:14.740 | Our society has made it seem like dinner is just this big huge task and it's going
00:09:22.040 | to just take so much of your time away and all of that and it's really not true.
00:09:28.920 | A lot of things, if you can just prep ahead of time, then it won't take near as much
00:09:37.720 | of your time.
00:09:39.400 | Just like I was talking about with the chicken enchiladas, if you prepped that ahead in the
00:09:44.720 | week, you had that already in your refrigerator or your freezer and you could just pull it
00:09:50.360 | out, well that took out so much of your time there.
00:09:53.640 | It's just a little bit of prep time that if you could do that ahead of time or even
00:09:59.640 | just cutting your vegetables ahead and putting them away in your refrigerator already pre-cut
00:10:07.280 | and things like that where you're just taking that time off earlier in the week instead
00:10:12.520 | of having to do those things ahead of time.
00:10:17.520 | I think that's one of the things that people really, when they look at having to eat at
00:10:22.480 | home more, it just seems so big.
00:10:26.640 | They think that they have to make these elaborate meals and stuff and it's really not even about
00:10:30.920 | that.
00:10:31.920 | What do you think about the once a month freezer cooking idea?
00:10:35.320 | I think it's great.
00:10:38.560 | I believe it was Dave Ramsey that even said that it's a huge money saver if you can shop
00:10:47.960 | more at one time than going small times all the time to the grocery store.
00:10:54.280 | My husband actually works in the grocery store industry and one of the things that they bank
00:11:00.020 | on is that each trip you come, you're going to grab something else that you did not need
00:11:06.640 | that was not on your list and that's an add-on situation.
00:11:11.200 | Each time, it doesn't really seem like you're grabbing something that's really such a big
00:11:16.800 | deal and it's going to break the bank.
00:11:18.480 | Oh, it's just a Coke, okay, or something like that.
00:11:22.400 | If you look at that over time, then that is adding so much more to your budget each month
00:11:30.080 | by just adding on one little thing.
00:11:33.360 | If you can even do even a week at a time, two weeks at a time freezer meals and things
00:11:39.800 | like that, then that's such a big help to cut down on your budget because that's more
00:11:45.840 | trips you're not taking to the grocery store.
00:11:48.840 | Yeah, a lot of times it's just cooking and working.
00:11:53.480 | For so many people, it's an endless cycle because if you have a dual parent household
00:11:59.880 | where both parents are working outside of the house and especially if you had kids in
00:12:04.720 | the mix, that evening time from 5 to 7 is the most stressful time of the day.
00:12:12.320 | Absolutely.
00:12:13.320 | The kids are at the end of their rope because they're hungry and they're tired and they're
00:12:17.400 | cranky.
00:12:18.720 | And then mom and dad are tired from working all day and then just the mental energy to
00:12:23.480 | say, "Well, I'm going to go home and whip up a beautiful, fresh, home-cooked meal out
00:12:27.600 | of fresh ingredients."
00:12:28.960 | It doesn't happen.
00:12:31.080 | But because it doesn't happen, then you wind up swinging by Boston Market or swinging by
00:12:37.120 | wherever and picking up a meal to go or going out.
00:12:40.280 | Well then you keep yourself stuck with high expenses and because of the high expenses,
00:12:45.200 | you look at the budget and say, "Well, there's nothing we can cut here.
00:12:48.720 | We've got to make this money."
00:12:51.200 | And it's an endless cycle.
00:12:52.200 | It's got to at some point change somewhere.
00:12:54.800 | And I think especially for parents who are working during the week, freezer cooking has
00:12:58.760 | a lot of potential for many families.
00:13:01.880 | Yes, definitely.
00:13:03.360 | And I mean, just looking up recipes in general where you know that you can put them in the
00:13:09.280 | freezer and it doesn't necessarily have to be all like crockpot meals.
00:13:15.160 | I had a friend that when she was pregnant actually, she had limited freezer space and
00:13:22.600 | we kind of worked with her freezer space and said, "Okay.
00:13:26.560 | Well, you can put this one in your freezer flat and then as you take it out of the freezer,
00:13:33.880 | put it in the refrigerator, it thaws out.
00:13:36.080 | All you have to do is put it in the pan and it's done."
00:13:39.280 | So it doesn't necessarily always have to be crockpot meals too because a lot of times
00:13:43.000 | think, "Oh, I don't even have a crockpot," or whatever.
00:13:46.720 | It's not always about that.
00:13:47.840 | I think sometimes it's just even if you make batches of spaghetti sauce or chili, you can
00:13:54.800 | make lots of things with chili ahead of time too.
00:13:58.080 | Nachos, hello.
00:14:00.840 | So I think a lot of that too, people just think that it has to be the thing that you
00:14:06.800 | put it in there for.
00:14:08.200 | Spaghetti sauce actually makes a really great base for homemade pizza.
00:14:14.160 | Things like that, just kind of looking outside of the box where you can do other things with
00:14:19.280 | what you have.
00:14:22.280 | Any other tips for those who are looking to transition things that you've learned that
00:14:25.960 | have helped you be able to make progress here?
00:14:29.760 | Yeah.
00:14:31.120 | When we first started this, we just looked at cutting one day out a week of going out,
00:14:39.120 | one meal.
00:14:40.920 | And I think sometimes if you tell somebody, "Listen, the average household spends $232
00:14:47.520 | a month on going out to eat," and you could drop that down considerably and just do little
00:14:56.960 | things.
00:14:57.960 | Maybe if you go out like we were right before we go to church on Wednesday nights to drop
00:15:04.280 | the kids off, we were doing that once a week.
00:15:07.000 | Well, just like I had said before, that saved us $120 at the very least a month just doing
00:15:14.640 | one meal, taking one meal out and eating that at home.
00:15:19.440 | And I think sometimes if you just tell people, "Oh, you need to stop eating out," I don't
00:15:22.880 | think that's really realistic.
00:15:26.160 | You're going to have the times where you have a birthday party or you need to run out because
00:15:32.720 | something happens.
00:15:33.760 | You need to still have that in your budget, but just to give your budget something realistic.
00:15:40.120 | It's a realistic amount that you're going to stick to.
00:15:43.680 | And if you look at it too where this is your overall food budget and this is how much you
00:15:49.800 | can spend on food, whether it be out to eat or at home, I think sometimes that gives you
00:15:57.600 | a little bit of motivation too.
00:15:59.400 | What was that average dining out number you cited?
00:16:04.640 | I don't know that number.
00:16:06.280 | What was it?
00:16:07.640 | The average household spends $232 a month, that's $2,700 a year, eating out, quick snacks,
00:16:18.240 | coffee.
00:16:19.240 | Coffee is our biggest in our house.
00:16:21.960 | That's our biggest thing.
00:16:23.920 | If you looked at how much coffee we drink, you would understand why we are such happy
00:16:27.880 | people.
00:16:28.880 | But yeah, I mean that's a huge difference.
00:16:31.960 | The average household meal at home is only $10 and that's more than the average meal
00:16:39.520 | for one person out.
00:16:42.600 | Restaurants are bumping whatever they spend on their food.
00:16:48.720 | It's like three times that is how they come up with their number for how much to charge
00:16:53.520 | you.
00:16:54.520 | How do you guys handle coffee expenses?
00:16:57.600 | What's your family routine?
00:16:59.520 | Well, it's kind of a treat for us now.
00:17:08.320 | I do love a good coffee out but when I look at how much that coffee costs and how much
00:17:17.160 | we could save in a week, just doing that at home is so much cheaper.
00:17:24.040 | So now it's kind of part of our date night routine.
00:17:29.320 | That's kind of more of a special thing.
00:17:32.440 | We don't get out much because we have four children.
00:17:34.920 | So it's a treat when we do get to go drink coffee out.
00:17:44.280 | One question about you mentioned that you recently, you were talking about how you recently
00:17:48.200 | made this transition to being a stay-at-home mom.
00:17:52.720 | How has that affected your family's lifestyle?
00:17:57.840 | It's been a huge difference for us.
00:18:03.160 | We had to be intentional about where we were spending our money.
00:18:12.040 | It's hard sometimes to look at the budget and think, "Oh my, we cannot trim this down
00:18:19.080 | anymore than we already have."
00:18:24.040 | For us, it took a lot.
00:18:27.080 | I kid you not when I tell you that I studied our budget for like a month and really looked
00:18:34.960 | at everything and said, "Okay, where can we cut out?
00:18:39.120 | What can we do differently?"
00:18:41.960 | For us, some of that was us eating at home.
00:18:45.220 | We took out that Chick-fil-A night.
00:18:47.720 | Kids were a little bit upset but they got over it.
00:18:52.920 | The other things that we did was I went to go cancel our cable.
00:18:59.840 | Our cable was like, "Well, hold on.
00:19:01.560 | Why are you canceling?
00:19:03.800 | You've had us for three years."
00:19:05.600 | "Yep, you're right."
00:19:08.080 | They had bumped our price up over time as they do.
00:19:12.160 | They said, "Is it the price?
00:19:13.920 | Because if it's the price, we can cut it in half."
00:19:17.560 | That was just out of a phone call.
00:19:19.840 | All I did was try to cancel it and they cut it in half.
00:19:24.520 | You're wishing you'd done it two years previously.
00:19:27.880 | I know.
00:19:28.880 | That's the thing.
00:19:31.520 | It never occurred to me to do that before.
00:19:35.320 | We have really had to look at our budget very differently and see what things could be taken
00:19:42.120 | out.
00:19:43.120 | We do not live these just lavish lives.
00:19:46.520 | We don't have car payments.
00:19:50.360 | That can't be taken out.
00:19:52.640 | You can't not take the kids to school one week to save the gas or something.
00:19:58.480 | It has to be other things that you can do things about.
00:20:02.320 | The other thing too is I really started shopping around for homeowner's insurance.
00:20:07.120 | We own a home.
00:20:10.400 | That was something else too that had never really occurred to me.
00:20:13.640 | We just got the homeowner's insurance that we had always had and didn't ask questions
00:20:20.800 | on how much it would cost anywhere else.
00:20:25.800 | We ended up cutting that in half also by switching to a different company.
00:20:30.760 | I just think that you have to be really intentional about looking at your budget.
00:20:36.480 | It has to be an each month thing.
00:20:38.960 | What can we do better with this next month?
00:20:43.180 | Can we cut something else out?
00:20:46.440 | One other idea, even eating at home, can you take meat out of one of your dinners one night?
00:20:53.360 | Just eat a meatless dinner.
00:20:55.160 | A lot of times they call them meatless Mondays.
00:20:58.160 | Can you do something like that to even take your meal costs down?
00:21:03.600 | At our house, you'll see it a lot on the blog, we have what we call a family buffet night
00:21:09.080 | where we clean the whole refrigerator out of all of the leftovers that we've had.
00:21:15.280 | You may get one spoonful of whatever, but a lot of times that's all you really want
00:21:21.160 | is just one spoonful.
00:21:22.440 | "Just one more bite of that one meal.
00:21:25.120 | It was so good the first time.
00:21:27.160 | Let's just have one more bite."
00:21:29.840 | Those are the ways that we've done things around here.
00:21:32.880 | I think that's really been very beneficial for us.
00:21:37.120 | Any other resources, websites, blogs, books that you have found really inspirational in
00:21:45.920 | your learning?
00:21:49.200 | I would say my husband and I love Dave Ramsey.
00:21:54.160 | I think who doesn't?
00:21:57.120 | I think he has been very good.
00:21:59.400 | We had gone through one of his books a couple years back and really felt like that was going
00:22:05.160 | to be the way that we needed to go.
00:22:07.640 | I also follow MoneySavingMom.com.
00:22:13.200 | She is very great at just coming out with out-of-the-box kind of things that maybe I
00:22:21.720 | hadn't thought about before.
00:22:24.280 | I think that those two things, I would say, have been the most beneficial for our whole
00:22:30.000 | process with this.
00:22:31.000 | What have you learned from blogging?
00:22:35.440 | Blogging.
00:22:36.440 | You're rolling in riches now because you started a blog, right?
00:22:43.960 | Not quite.
00:22:46.200 | I would say blogging to me has really been kind of fun, to tell you the truth.
00:22:55.840 | A lot of my friends have always thought that I was a bit crazy with my food.
00:23:04.000 | I talk about it a lot on the blog.
00:23:06.760 | I have become, I would say over the last year or so, I've become like the dessert person.
00:23:13.040 | I don't know how that is, but I would say that I make almost one dessert for an event
00:23:21.000 | almost every week now.
00:23:23.280 | Actually, I'm making two this weekend, so that should count for something.
00:23:30.040 | I would say that's been kind of a thing.
00:23:33.040 | That's also been a little bit of a challenge for me, too, because I'm trying to not make
00:23:38.160 | the same dessert over again for my women's Bible study.
00:23:41.840 | I think that's kind of fun for me to try and come up with new things that I haven't made
00:23:48.400 | for them before or things that I think that they would like.
00:23:53.200 | So I think that's been kind of fun.
00:23:58.520 | I am not rolling in riches with the blogging, but I think in general it's just been fun
00:24:07.080 | just to kind of see how many recipes I've come up with.
00:24:10.640 | I came up with close to 100 this past year to put on the blog, which is more than some
00:24:19.480 | people know altogether.
00:24:22.000 | So I think that's kind of fun, kind of challenging to see when I'll run out.
00:24:28.360 | Did you ever have a class in home economics in school?
00:24:31.880 | I did.
00:24:34.240 | I was always really interested in that.
00:24:36.520 | Actually, at the high school that I went to, they even had a restaurant class as well.
00:24:42.440 | So I did that as well where we kind of did more of catering things.
00:24:50.320 | So I think I've always kind of liked food.
00:24:55.800 | I talk about food quite often, so it makes sense to write about it too.
00:25:00.760 | It seems to me like a lot of what we talk about is the core foundation of home economics
00:25:07.640 | and of the skills of being a homemaker.
00:25:11.400 | And it seems like very few people these days know anything about the skills of being a
00:25:15.880 | homemaker, but all these things that you describe are skills, are skills that can be learned
00:25:22.520 | and they're skills that we used to have classes on that these days have been, for the most
00:25:28.840 | part, disposed of in favor of more academic skills.
00:25:34.080 | But I look at it and I say, "What makes a difference?"
00:25:35.880 | It makes a difference to be able to know how to shop for good deals.
00:25:39.600 | It makes a difference to know how to repair something.
00:25:42.280 | It makes a difference to be able to know how to do these basic things yourself and it makes
00:25:46.160 | a big difference in your family's budget.
00:25:48.160 | Absolutely.
00:25:49.160 | And I think, you know, who I call my littles on the blog are four years old and three years
00:25:57.440 | old and you teach them how to do fractions and things like that even at that age when
00:26:06.520 | they're helping make cookies and you're telling them it's a third a cup or a half a cup, you
00:26:11.920 | know, that was another way for me to kind of help even my fourth grader with fractions
00:26:20.080 | because fractions is one of the hardest things in school even now for teachers.
00:26:25.400 | They say the same thing.
00:26:26.560 | It's just hard to teach fractions.
00:26:29.600 | And in recipes, that's a perfect example of how you can do that and they don't even know
00:26:34.800 | you're teaching them that.
00:26:36.400 | That's awesome.
00:26:38.200 | Your website, Katara, is freetocook.com.
00:26:41.840 | Anywhere else that you'd like people to find you online?
00:26:45.320 | I have a Facebook page that I'm always uploading different recipes and things like that.
00:26:53.080 | I'm also on Instagram so you can drool over food.
00:26:57.960 | And yeah, so that's kind of the way and on Pinterest as well.
00:27:02.960 | Awesome.
00:27:03.960 | I'll link that stuff in the show notes.
00:27:04.960 | Thanks for coming on today.
00:27:05.960 | Thank you.
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