Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My guest today is Keturah Free. Keturah is a personal finance blogger and she's a wife and mother.

And today she's here to share some of her experience and some of her knowledge and insight into how you can save money by learning to more effectively cook at home. Keturah, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I've invited you on, secret society of Radical Personal Finance guests, to talk today about meal planning and meal preparation.

I know this is something that you care a lot about, you write a lot about on your website, freetocook.com. And I'd love for you to start though by simply sharing your story. What's your personal story as it relates to money? Our personal story is I am a mother of four.

My husband and I, a handful of years ago, we were kind of doing what we like to call hot bunking where my husband... That's a military term. I like it. Yes, yes. My husband worked nights and I worked during the day. So our bed was constantly hot from someone being in there.

That made it very difficult for us to have good quality family time. So a lot of times, we would just kind of do whatever. But the days that he was off, it was really important for us to have family meal time. A while back, we had read some stuff from a therapist that had kind of talked about how family meal time is actually very beneficial.

Not only does it save you money from eating at home instead of eating out, but just that you have a lot of psychological benefits from eating as a family. So that's kind of how we started things. Obviously, we like to save money by eating at home as well. And then recently, within the last year, we have decided that it's going to be more beneficial for our family for me to be a stay-at-home mom and also blog instead of working outside of the home.

So that also kind of worked with our budget and all of that to try and keep a lot of our meals in our house. So. Were you always good at, like in the time that both of you guys were working, were you good at saving money and eating at home or was this a transformation of some kind that you went through?

I would say we were starting to eat out a lot just because life gets busy and instead of spending that time at home, it was just, "Oh, well, that was so much easier to do this as we were taking the kids from here or there or running to the next place." A lot of times for my husband and I, we would go out to lunch a lot since that was kind of like his in-between time of where he was going to work and I was, at least I was off for lunch.

So we would kind of do a lot of the out to eat for lunch, which is not a whole lot more expensive or less expensive to tell you the truth. So we were still spending a lot of money doing that kind of stuff. Did you track since you started making a focused effort to eat at home more, did you track the difference that that made in your family budget by any chance?

You know, I don't think we did like a huge like, "This is how much we're saving each month," because our family, we had also added on two children in that time frame. So it's kind of hard to figure out because we're not really comparing apples to apples at that point.

But I would say, you know, more recently, we were at least going out to eat one night a week as a family. Give or take, we were even going to like Chick-fil-A and stuff like that. Well, even with our family of six, going to Chick-fil-A is $35. So $35 times four in a month, we're still spending $130, $140 give or take just to go out to Chick-fil-A once a week.

So for us, we're at least saving that much. Yeah. What do you do to encourage other people to eat at home more? I personally make a weekly menu. I put that on my blog each week just to kind of help encourage others to eat at home. A lot of my menus include recipes that I've already had on the blog.

So it's kind of like, "Here's something that you can make along with me." And when I'm making my menus each week, I base it off of our weekly ad and we shop at Publix. So I just go on there and make our meals based off of things that they have on sale each week or if I have things in our pantry that we've gotten in other sales and things like that.

So that's kind of what I do and then if somebody doesn't like that recipe, we'll put something else in place. Publix is the greatest southern treasure that a quarter of the US gets to experience. Yeah, definitely. So my wife and I, we always find this area to be challenging and it seems like – we don't eat out very much.

Generally, if we eat out, it's planned and it's a specific location. But I still find it – we find it challenging just simply to control the grocery bill. I often feel when I go through our budget, I'm like, "Man, it just seems like we shouldn't have to spend as much as we do in this category." So I'm always looking for ideas and ways that we can get better but it's challenging because we're all busy and it takes time.

As with anything, it takes time to be proactive, to be ahead of the game in order to make progress in this area. When you sit down and look at a sale flyer from the grocery store, how do you convert that into a menu? I would say for someone who's just kind of starting out is just to maybe just make a list of all of the meals that you like.

Now for me, when I first started dating my husband, I kind of made that a challenge where I did not want to make the same thing for him for a year which that's a little bit much for most people and that's not to say that I didn't make some of his favorites every now and then or whatever but that's kind of how I had challenged myself.

The average person though, if you come up with even 30 meals that you can rotate in, in that way it's pretty easy for you to go through a flyer and say, "Okay, chicken's on sale. We like chicken enchiladas," for example. Then what I can do also with some of my meals that I have posted on the blog, like chicken enchiladas is a perfect example.

That for our family makes two pans. I make one tonight and then I freeze the second one so that if we come up short on another week or whatever the case may be, if I need something quicker where I don't need all the meal prep, then we can just pull it out and then throw it in the oven and we're done.

I think that's really helpful too to kind of just have a handful of meals that you can either make doubles of and it's not really that hard to do that or if you're having company over and you need those two pans, then you have two pans. I would say that's probably the big thing for a lot of people is to kind of know what meals your family likes so that you can kind of rotate them in a month or whatever as you're looking at the ads.

What's the hardest thing for people who are intentionally focusing on this goal of eating at home more? What's the hardest, what's the biggest complaint that people have, the biggest thing they find difficult to make this transition? I would say that it's time. Our society has made it seem like dinner is just this big huge task and it's going to just take so much of your time away and all of that and it's really not true.

A lot of things, if you can just prep ahead of time, then it won't take near as much of your time. Just like I was talking about with the chicken enchiladas, if you prepped that ahead in the week, you had that already in your refrigerator or your freezer and you could just pull it out, well that took out so much of your time there.

It's just a little bit of prep time that if you could do that ahead of time or even just cutting your vegetables ahead and putting them away in your refrigerator already pre-cut and things like that where you're just taking that time off earlier in the week instead of having to do those things ahead of time.

I think that's one of the things that people really, when they look at having to eat at home more, it just seems so big. They think that they have to make these elaborate meals and stuff and it's really not even about that. What do you think about the once a month freezer cooking idea?

I think it's great. I believe it was Dave Ramsey that even said that it's a huge money saver if you can shop more at one time than going small times all the time to the grocery store. My husband actually works in the grocery store industry and one of the things that they bank on is that each trip you come, you're going to grab something else that you did not need that was not on your list and that's an add-on situation.

Each time, it doesn't really seem like you're grabbing something that's really such a big deal and it's going to break the bank. Oh, it's just a Coke, okay, or something like that. If you look at that over time, then that is adding so much more to your budget each month by just adding on one little thing.

If you can even do even a week at a time, two weeks at a time freezer meals and things like that, then that's such a big help to cut down on your budget because that's more trips you're not taking to the grocery store. Yeah, a lot of times it's just cooking and working.

For so many people, it's an endless cycle because if you have a dual parent household where both parents are working outside of the house and especially if you had kids in the mix, that evening time from 5 to 7 is the most stressful time of the day. Absolutely. The kids are at the end of their rope because they're hungry and they're tired and they're cranky.

And then mom and dad are tired from working all day and then just the mental energy to say, "Well, I'm going to go home and whip up a beautiful, fresh, home-cooked meal out of fresh ingredients." It doesn't happen. But because it doesn't happen, then you wind up swinging by Boston Market or swinging by wherever and picking up a meal to go or going out.

Well then you keep yourself stuck with high expenses and because of the high expenses, you look at the budget and say, "Well, there's nothing we can cut here. We've got to make this money." And it's an endless cycle. It's got to at some point change somewhere. And I think especially for parents who are working during the week, freezer cooking has a lot of potential for many families.

Yes, definitely. And I mean, just looking up recipes in general where you know that you can put them in the freezer and it doesn't necessarily have to be all like crockpot meals. I had a friend that when she was pregnant actually, she had limited freezer space and we kind of worked with her freezer space and said, "Okay.

Well, you can put this one in your freezer flat and then as you take it out of the freezer, put it in the refrigerator, it thaws out. All you have to do is put it in the pan and it's done." So it doesn't necessarily always have to be crockpot meals too because a lot of times think, "Oh, I don't even have a crockpot," or whatever.

It's not always about that. I think sometimes it's just even if you make batches of spaghetti sauce or chili, you can make lots of things with chili ahead of time too. Nachos, hello. So I think a lot of that too, people just think that it has to be the thing that you put it in there for.

Spaghetti sauce actually makes a really great base for homemade pizza. Things like that, just kind of looking outside of the box where you can do other things with what you have. Any other tips for those who are looking to transition things that you've learned that have helped you be able to make progress here?

Yeah. When we first started this, we just looked at cutting one day out a week of going out, one meal. And I think sometimes if you tell somebody, "Listen, the average household spends $232 a month on going out to eat," and you could drop that down considerably and just do little things.

Maybe if you go out like we were right before we go to church on Wednesday nights to drop the kids off, we were doing that once a week. Well, just like I had said before, that saved us $120 at the very least a month just doing one meal, taking one meal out and eating that at home.

And I think sometimes if you just tell people, "Oh, you need to stop eating out," I don't think that's really realistic. You're going to have the times where you have a birthday party or you need to run out because something happens. You need to still have that in your budget, but just to give your budget something realistic.

It's a realistic amount that you're going to stick to. And if you look at it too where this is your overall food budget and this is how much you can spend on food, whether it be out to eat or at home, I think sometimes that gives you a little bit of motivation too.

What was that average dining out number you cited? I don't know that number. What was it? The average household spends $232 a month, that's $2,700 a year, eating out, quick snacks, coffee. Coffee is our biggest in our house. That's our biggest thing. If you looked at how much coffee we drink, you would understand why we are such happy people.

But yeah, I mean that's a huge difference. The average household meal at home is only $10 and that's more than the average meal for one person out. Restaurants are bumping whatever they spend on their food. It's like three times that is how they come up with their number for how much to charge you.

How do you guys handle coffee expenses? What's your family routine? Well, it's kind of a treat for us now. I do love a good coffee out but when I look at how much that coffee costs and how much we could save in a week, just doing that at home is so much cheaper.

So now it's kind of part of our date night routine. That's kind of more of a special thing. We don't get out much because we have four children. So it's a treat when we do get to go drink coffee out. One question about you mentioned that you recently, you were talking about how you recently made this transition to being a stay-at-home mom.

How has that affected your family's lifestyle? It's been a huge difference for us. We had to be intentional about where we were spending our money. It's hard sometimes to look at the budget and think, "Oh my, we cannot trim this down anymore than we already have." For us, it took a lot.

I kid you not when I tell you that I studied our budget for like a month and really looked at everything and said, "Okay, where can we cut out? What can we do differently?" For us, some of that was us eating at home. We took out that Chick-fil-A night.

Kids were a little bit upset but they got over it. The other things that we did was I went to go cancel our cable. Our cable was like, "Well, hold on. Why are you canceling? You've had us for three years." "Yep, you're right." They had bumped our price up over time as they do.

They said, "Is it the price? Because if it's the price, we can cut it in half." That was just out of a phone call. All I did was try to cancel it and they cut it in half. You're wishing you'd done it two years previously. I know. That's the thing.

It never occurred to me to do that before. We have really had to look at our budget very differently and see what things could be taken out. We do not live these just lavish lives. We don't have car payments. That can't be taken out. You can't not take the kids to school one week to save the gas or something.

It has to be other things that you can do things about. The other thing too is I really started shopping around for homeowner's insurance. We own a home. That was something else too that had never really occurred to me. We just got the homeowner's insurance that we had always had and didn't ask questions on how much it would cost anywhere else.

We ended up cutting that in half also by switching to a different company. I just think that you have to be really intentional about looking at your budget. It has to be an each month thing. What can we do better with this next month? Can we cut something else out?

One other idea, even eating at home, can you take meat out of one of your dinners one night? Just eat a meatless dinner. A lot of times they call them meatless Mondays. Can you do something like that to even take your meal costs down? At our house, you'll see it a lot on the blog, we have what we call a family buffet night where we clean the whole refrigerator out of all of the leftovers that we've had.

You may get one spoonful of whatever, but a lot of times that's all you really want is just one spoonful. "Just one more bite of that one meal. It was so good the first time. Let's just have one more bite." Those are the ways that we've done things around here.

I think that's really been very beneficial for us. Any other resources, websites, blogs, books that you have found really inspirational in your learning? I would say my husband and I love Dave Ramsey. I think who doesn't? I think he has been very good. We had gone through one of his books a couple years back and really felt like that was going to be the way that we needed to go.

I also follow MoneySavingMom.com. She is very great at just coming out with out-of-the-box kind of things that maybe I hadn't thought about before. I think that those two things, I would say, have been the most beneficial for our whole process with this. What have you learned from blogging? Blogging.

You're rolling in riches now because you started a blog, right? Not quite. I would say blogging to me has really been kind of fun, to tell you the truth. A lot of my friends have always thought that I was a bit crazy with my food. I talk about it a lot on the blog.

I have become, I would say over the last year or so, I've become like the dessert person. I don't know how that is, but I would say that I make almost one dessert for an event almost every week now. Actually, I'm making two this weekend, so that should count for something.

I would say that's been kind of a thing. That's also been a little bit of a challenge for me, too, because I'm trying to not make the same dessert over again for my women's Bible study. I think that's kind of fun for me to try and come up with new things that I haven't made for them before or things that I think that they would like.

So I think that's been kind of fun. I am not rolling in riches with the blogging, but I think in general it's just been fun just to kind of see how many recipes I've come up with. I came up with close to 100 this past year to put on the blog, which is more than some people know altogether.

So I think that's kind of fun, kind of challenging to see when I'll run out. Did you ever have a class in home economics in school? I did. I was always really interested in that. Actually, at the high school that I went to, they even had a restaurant class as well.

So I did that as well where we kind of did more of catering things. So I think I've always kind of liked food. I talk about food quite often, so it makes sense to write about it too. It seems to me like a lot of what we talk about is the core foundation of home economics and of the skills of being a homemaker.

And it seems like very few people these days know anything about the skills of being a homemaker, but all these things that you describe are skills, are skills that can be learned and they're skills that we used to have classes on that these days have been, for the most part, disposed of in favor of more academic skills.

But I look at it and I say, "What makes a difference?" It makes a difference to be able to know how to shop for good deals. It makes a difference to know how to repair something. It makes a difference to be able to know how to do these basic things yourself and it makes a big difference in your family's budget.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, who I call my littles on the blog are four years old and three years old and you teach them how to do fractions and things like that even at that age when they're helping make cookies and you're telling them it's a third a cup or a half a cup, you know, that was another way for me to kind of help even my fourth grader with fractions because fractions is one of the hardest things in school even now for teachers.

They say the same thing. It's just hard to teach fractions. And in recipes, that's a perfect example of how you can do that and they don't even know you're teaching them that. That's awesome. Your website, Katara, is freetocook.com. Anywhere else that you'd like people to find you online? I have a Facebook page that I'm always uploading different recipes and things like that.

I'm also on Instagram so you can drool over food. And yeah, so that's kind of the way and on Pinterest as well. Awesome. I'll link that stuff in the show notes. Thanks for coming on today. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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