How I budget with a variable income

This article is by staff writer Kristin Wong.

It seems like everybody’s goal lately is to leave their job and become a freelancer. And that’s great! Freelancing gives you flexibility and control — and, plus, you get to work from home in your yoga pants.

But as someone who has transitioned into that role full-time, there are certain things I do miss about having an employer:

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  401(k) match

  
  


• 
  

  Insurance benefits

  
  


• 
  

  Free coffee

  
  


• 
  

  Office buddies

  
  


• 
  

  Income stability

  
  

Last year, I freelanced, but my monthly income was more or less the same — and, if not, it was easy to predict. This year, as a true freelancer with multiple clients, there are a lot of things that affect my budget (like how long it takes for a client to pay, for example) and they’re mostly out of my control.

For the most part, my income doesn’t vary too much from month to month. When I was in between work at the beginning of the year, however, it was a different story. Either way, here’s how I budget with an irregular income.

Zero-sum monthly spending

Zero-sum budgeting has always been my method of choice. I was using this method before I even knew it had a name. I find it works well with financial goals like saving or getting out of debt.

In her post on this topic, Holly Johnson outlines the steps to create a zero-sum budget. It involves listing all of your expenses, budgeting for them, and then putting the excess to work. Every dollar has a duty. For a monthly amount to budget against, I simply use the lowest amount I’ve earned in the past six months. I would go for the past 12 months, as J.D. recommended in his own irregular income post, but I was in emergency mode in January, so that amount is pretty low already.

I zero-sum budget according to that amount, and my excess income goes toward my savings goals. It used to go toward debt goals.

Checking account cushion

I’m too lazy to figure out how much I need to have in my checking account at various times during the month — after rent, after bills, etc. — so I simply keep a checking account cushion that’s more or less equal to the amount of my monthly living expenses. This helps ensure that, even after rent, I have enough in my checking to cover bills. Once I’m paid, and the amount in my checking exceeds my monthly expenses, I then transfer it to savings.

My savings method

I have a few different savings accounts:

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  A high-yield online account (for estimated taxes and my emergency fund)

  
  


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  Traditional IRA (I want to switch to a Roth soon)

  
  


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  SEP-IRA (extra retirement account if I max out my traditional IRA)

  
  


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  Taxable brokerage account (for a medium-term goal)

  
  

Here’s what I do:

First, I have a baseline amount, a “cushion,” of $ 5,000 in my online savings. This is my emergency fund/estimated quarterly taxes account. If an emergency were to arise, I feel confident that this would be enough to get me by until I could …

1. find extra work


2. pull money out of that taxable brokerage account (or)


3. replenish it by saving more.

(Note: When I was paying off debt and I didn’t have a brokerage account from which to draw, I had much more in my emergency fund. As my finances became more secure, I pared down this fund. Lisa Aberle wrote about this concept in her post on emergency funds.)

I save for about three to four months in this account; so during that time, ideally I will have more than the baseline amount. I think of it as a holding account, basically. And after I have saved up enough to invest, I take the money out, invest it, and leave the $ 5,000 baseline amount in the account.

My savings goals are simply to max out my retirement each year, save X amount for a medium-term goal, and then save the rest in my SEP-IRA. So when I’ve hoarded enough in my holding account, I save the surplus according to where I’m at with those goals.

Estimated taxes

Maybe you’re wondering what I do come quarterly tax time when I have to write a big, tear-soaked check to the IRS.

Let’s say I have $ 5,000 in my regular online savings come tax time. First, I calculate my estimated quarterly taxes. I estimate what I expect to earn for the year and then consider what I’ve already paid them. Let’s say the quarterly amount I owe is $ 3,000. I now have $ 2,000 left in my online savings — which is below my baseline amount. I simply keep saving until I get back to my safety number of $ 5,000. Then I go back to my system and save accordingly.

In his post, J.D. recommended creating a “business” account, separate from your personal account:

“From this money, pay yourself as if you were an employee. Your monthly salary is whatever you calculated as your monthly budget, your minimum monthly income from the past twelve months. On a set date each month, write yourself a paycheck. Leave the rest of the money in your business account.”

This is similar to my savings account. The difference is really just timing. He puts his income in the business account first, then pays himself. I pay myself from my income first, then put the rest in that account. He uses that account for estimated taxes too.

Really, my system boils down to just a few things:

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  Savings for quarterly taxes that double as an emergency fund

  
  


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  Investment accounts for goals, including retirement

  
  


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  A checking account cushion

  
  


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  Accumulating money in my savings account until I have enough to invest

  
  

Of course, my method might not be for everyone but, so far, it’s worked for me.

If you have an income that varies from month to month, how do you budget?

Get Rich Slowly – Personal Finance That Makes Sense.

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Nine Strategies for Stretching Out a Tiny Food Budget

We’ve all faced it at some point in our life.

Your next paycheck isn’t due to arrive for a week or so. You don’t have much in your checking account and there’s not too much in the cupboards, either. You need to put food on the table for the next week but you have only a tiny amount of money.

What do you do?

In this situation, many of the usual strategies don’t work. Grow a garden? Useless; you don’t have three months to wait for food to grow. Buy in bulk? How exactly are you going to do that with an extremely limited budget?

I’ve been in this situation a few times, particularly during my college years, but even a couple of times later on. It’s hard, especially when you have family members relying on you, particularly children.

Thankfully, there are a number of short-term strategies you can use that will help you stretch a handful of dollars across a surprising number of days, keeping food on the table for your whole family. Not only are these strategies useful during these short-term pinches, they’re also useful for day-to-day life in terms of keeping your food budget low.

Let’s dig in.

Clean Out the Pantry/Cupboards

The first step you should take is to go through your pantry, cupboards, and refrigerator and take stock of everything you have. There are several reasons for doing this.

One, people often have more useful food on hand than they think. It’s easy to forget about nonperishable items stuffed in the back of the cupboard or in a corner in the pantry. It’s also easy to forget about sauces and other items in the back of the refrigerator, still good but forgotten.

Two, it gives you a chance to get rid of bad food. This is a great chance to toss highly stale, moldy, or otherwise damaged food items that you wouldn’t otherwise eat.

Three, the process often inspires meals. Every time I dig through our pantry, I find myself plotting a number of meals from the things that I pull out of the cupboard. These are meals that aren’t even remotely on my mind before I start pulling out items, but I’m simply inspired by what I find.

Four, the packages themselves sometimes inspire recipes. Many packages include simple four or five ingredient recipes that can directly inspire you to make something.

Finally, it gives you a chance to make an inventory. Often, you have more components for a meal on hand than you think you do, even if you don’t have everything. Making a big master list of all of the stuff you have on hand makes it much, much easier to plan out some meals to get you through the rest of your lean period.

Another point of advice: the sell-by date doesn’t mean the “throw it away” date. Most of those dates, particularly on non-refrigerated items, simply refer to the date by which the manufacturer will no longer vouch for the product. That does not mean it’s no longer edible or usable. Look for obvious signs of spoilage, not a sell-by date.

This pile of food should help you along the path to at least a few meals (even if it means pancakes for supper!).

Scour the Grocery Flyers

Your local grocery stores each likely issue a weekly flyer outlining the items that are on sale for that week. Sometimes, the flyer includes coupons for additional discounts.

These flyers are incredibly useful. Flyers, along with all of the food you’ve pulled out of your cupboard, can provide all that you need to plan meals until you’ve got some money in your checking account again.

First, I look for foods that have a low “price per pound.” Fresh produce and meats usually have “price per pound” listed in the flyer, like $ 1.79/lb. Look for the fruits, vegetables, and meats that can be acquired at a really low price and focus on those items. What can you do with them along with the items you already have?

Next, I look for obvious items that complete meals based on what I already have. For example, if I already have pasta sauce but no pasta, I’ll look for cheap pasta. If I already have a pancake mix that just requires a bit of milk, I’ll look for cheap milk. You get the idea.

Then, I look for items that work as standalone side dishes. Potatoes, for example, can be turned into a number of side dishes with little effort. Flash frozen vegetable bags from the freezer aisle can also add nutrition to your meal at a very low price.

Finally, I check online for coupons on the items I’ve already selected from the flyer. If I can find even a coupon or two, I’m taking advantage of “stacking” where I’m using both the sale and the coupon to really chop down the price of foods.

Ideally, I’m mostly relying on the stuff from my cupboard for meals, but the items here can really complement those items and help me to make a lot of meals.

Focus on High “Calorie Per Penny” Foods

There are some foods that not only work in a lot of different meals, but also provide a surprising amount of nutrition for just pennies. They’re often on sale, dropping their price even more, and they’re actually pretty healthy to boot.

In my experience, six foods really stand out from the pack.

Rice is incredibly cheap and filling. You can buy twenty pounds of dry long-grain rice for less than $ 9 and, upon cooking, it nearly doubles in size, meaning you’re spending about a quarter per pound of cooked rice. Rice is like a blank canvas upon which you can cook almost anything, from adding sugar and cinnamon for something sweet to adding spices for a wide variety of ethnic styles.

Dry beans offer most of the same advantages of rice in that they’re already cheap in their dry form, but more than double in mass when cooked thanks to water absorption, dropping the price right down into the fifty or sixty cents per pound range. There are many different varieties of beans that work well in so many different contexts – side dishes, soups, salads, tortilla fillings, and so on.

Oatmeal is an incredibly healthy breakfast, contributing fiber and many other nutrients to your diet, and it can be acquired well below a dollar a pound dry. Oatmeal can be supplemented with almost any fruit or sweetener to make a distinct meal and it’s an incredible way to fill yourself up in the mornings.

Eggs can be found for as low as a dollar a dozen and is likely the best source of protein on this list. Eggs are also quite flexible as they work as food on their own in many different preparations as well as an ingredient in countless other things – egg drop soup, pad thai, and on and on and on.

Sweet potatoes are, like all of the other items on this list, cheap and flexible. They’re very nutritious and can be prepared in countless different ways, easily working both as a savory and a sweet food. Sarah is a huge fan of these, so they’re regularly consumed at our house.

Peanut butter rounds out this list. Peanut butter is almost constantly on sale and, again, can be used in a variety of ways such as sandwiches, pancake toppings, or even as an element in a stir fry.

There are other known “cheap” foods like ramen noodles, but they’re unhealthy enough that you should use them sparingly. A diet of mostly ramen noodles will have health consequences.

If your grocery list is mostly full of these items and items that are on sale at the store, you’ll be getting a lot of food for very little at the store.

Make Homemade Foods

There are many foods that you might be tempted to buy at the store but you can in fact make it at home with stuff you likely already have on hand.

For example, consider a loaf of bread. If you have flour and yeast in your cupboard, water from your tap, and an oven, you can make your own bread. There are countless variations on the recipe for a humble loaf of bread, but they’re all straightforward and easy to make at home.

The ideas are endless. Turn that homemade bread into croutons by seasoning slices, cutting them into cubes, and baking them. Make corn tortillas at home out of masa flour (it’s like $ 2 for five pounds) and water. Make tortilla chips by cutting up those corn tortillas and baking them. Make refried beans by cooking beans to death in a slow cooker (with some onions, green peppers, and oil). Make potato chips by thinly slicing potatoes, tossing on some seasoning, and baking them. I could literally go on all day, but you get the idea.

Quite often, you’ll have the ingredients you need for a lot of these simple foods already in your pantry, likely purchased for other cooking experiments. Try making some things yourself and you’ll likely be shocked by how easy it is.

Shop Alone with a Grocery List Based on a Meal Plan

That simple statement breaks down into three separate pieces, so let’s look at those pieces.

Shop alone When you shop with others, you’re asking to be distracted and not focused on the task at hand, which is maximizing the value you get from every dollar you spend at the grocery store. Your kids distract you. Your spouse will, too. Your friends certainly will. If it is at all possible, you need to shop without them so you can keep your mind solely on the matter at hand.

With a grocery list You should have a grocery list in your hand that lists just the foods you need to get through until you have your paycheck. Nothing should go into your cart that isn’t on that list. In fact, you should have a pretty good idea of exactly how much you’re going to spend as soon as you walk in the door – the grocery flyer should have told you that.

Based on a meal plan That grocery list should have been generated from a meal plan, which is simply a list of the meals you intend to have until your short-term financial situation improves. That meal plan, of course, is based on the food items you already have and those found in the flyers, so your grocery list should naturally contain mostly sale items.

It’s a pretty straightforward system, one that I’ve been using for years to keep our food costs cheap. It works regardless of your situation.

Shop at the Cheapest Grocery Store

If you’re buying anything that’s not directly from the flyers, you’re going to be paying the typical store price. The way to minimize the price on those items is to shop at the store with the lowest prices.

Around here, that’s usually Aldi, though Fareway can give it a run for its money on many items. The other grocers almost always have higher prices on the whole.

How can you figure out which local grocer is the cheapest? In a pinch, you should ask your friends and coworkers that live in the area for advice. What do they think is the cheapest one? If you have a bit more time, you can price check them. Make a list of fifteen or twenty of the items you buy most often, then go to several stores and write down the price of those items. Total up the prices from each store and you’ll quickly see which one is clearly your discount grocer.

I do most of my grocery shopping at Fareway, as it balances low prices and selection. Aldi is cheaper, but sometimes their selection is sorely limited, leaving me to shop elsewhere.

Shop at the End of a Farmer’s Market

Another cheap food strategy is to shop at the end of a farmer’s market and haggle.

When you see people getting ready to pack things up at the end of a farmer’s market, go up to them and make a lowball offer on the items they still have out there. If they’re selling cabbage for $ 3 per head, make an offer of $ 1 or even $ 0.50 for that head. If they’re selling carrots for $ 2 a bundle, offer $ 0.50 for a bundle.

The problem with this strategy is that you’ll get the items that have been picked over by the other shoppers and, quite often, the item you want is already going to be sold out. However, if you’re willing to work with whatever you can get to make a tasty and nutritious meal on the cheap, you can get a good discount here.

I like to use these kinds of purchases in flexible meals. I’ll often make a stir fry out of any vegetables I can get on the cheap – and some fruits, too. I can also make soup out of virtually any set of vegetables – just toss in lots of veggies with some salt and pepper and let it simmer for a long time.

Drink Water

The water coming from your tap should be your primary source for beverages. Not bottled water, not soda, not coffee, not alcohol – tap water.

Why? Tap water is practically free. It’s just as safe as bottled water. It’s not loaded down with sugar or other substances that you don’t really need. Plus, it’s a great way to fill yourself up before a meal so you don’t overeat.

By eliminating beverages from your grocery purchases, you can save quite a bit of money and channel that savings directly into food purchases that can provide some real nutrition and calories.

Leave the soda and the tea and the coffee and the alcohol behind. Stick with water.

Check Out Community Dinners

If you’re still struggling for short-term food options, look around your community for community dinners.

Many of the churches in our area as well as some of the civic groups have a “community dinner” on a very regular schedule where people give a “free will” donation in order to enjoy a meal. If you’re strapped for cash, don’t be afraid to go there and get a great meal for a dollar.

In my experience, these meals are usually surprisingly good. They’re a great way to fill yourself – or your family – up for just a few dollars or even for free if you’re really struggling.

It’s important to remember, though, that such meals run largely on donations. It is vital that you pay back this type of giving later on when you have more money in your pocket. If you enjoy a few meals there for free or for just a dollar or two, go back later when you can drop a $ 10 or a $ 20 bill into the collection jar.

Within a twenty mile radius of our house, I was able to identify seven regularly scheduled community meals that are either entirely free or based on freewill donations. If you’re looking for meals in your area, I suggest starting with the local churches. Check their websites or give them a call to see what they have on offer.

Final Thoughts

Almost everyone struggles with putting together enough cash for a meal at some point on their financial journey. It can be a heartbreaking struggle, too, especially if you have children at home.

All of the strategies in this article are short-term strategies to help get you over that financial hump. While they certainly can help over the long term if you keep doing them – and we certainly use most of them – they’re mostly useful for just minimizing your spending this week.

A good long-term strategy for lower food costs includes other things.

Buying in bulk Buying nonperishable foods that you use all the time in a bulk purchase can save you a lot of money. If you eat rice or beans multiple times a week, buying a 20 lb. or 50 lb. bag of the stuff will save you a quarter or more per pound which adds up to a lot of savings over time.

Making meals in advance Whenever you make a meal, particularly something that’s a casserole-style meal, you can make several copies of that meal at once without adding too much time to the equation. Then, you just pop those extra versions in the freezer. When you need a meal later, you pull one out and cook it. This allows you to buy the ingredients in bulk – even relatively perishable items.

Growing a garden If you have a little patch of ground that you can cultivate, gardening can be a very inexpensive way to get quite a lot of produce. Sure, you’ll have to wait a few months to make it work, but the rewards can be tremendous. There are few things more heartwarming than having a kitchen counter completely covered in tomatoes or cucumbers (or whatever your favorite vegetable is).

At the same time, if you’re struggling to buy food, it’s likely a sign that you need to rethink your personal financial situation. You may want to consider finding additional work, even if it’s not in your current field. You may want to start looking very carefully at your current spending habits. You might also want to look at major financial changes, like moving to lower-cost housing.

This might just be a moment in your life that you can survive, but it might also be the beginning of real change in your life.

Good luck.

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Seven Clever Food Strategies for Stretching a Small Food Budget (and Nine Foods That Are Filling, Healthy, and Cheap!)

There are a lot of strategies out there for stretching a food budget, from couponing to meal planning. I’ve laid out our six-step plan for organizing cheap meals many times on The Simple Dollar, and it’s a routine we stick to almost every week.

Still, that’s not the end of the road when it comes to stretching your food budget. You can buy lots of cheap food at the store, but if it doesn’t fill you up, you’re going to constantly find reasons to snack and buy additional foods, which undoes the benefits of buying cheap food.

The best approach is to not just focus on cheap as your sole purpose in buying food. Instead, you should focus on finding a smart middle ground between cheap, healthy, and filling.

Cheap foods make sense – you want to spend as little as possible on the “food” portion of your budget.

Healthy foods make sense, too – healthier foods reduce long-term health care costs and provide some quality of life benefits.

Filling foods fall in line with “cheap” in that they reduce your desire to snack, thus reducing your food budget.

Here are seven strategies my family uses to hit this trifecta.

Eat Balanced Meals

Our family defines a “balanced meal” as one containing a roughly equal balance between carbohydrates, healthy fats, and protein. While we don’t stress out about perfectly balancing every meal, we try to balance meals across the length of a day. How do you achieve that? It’s actually pretty easy and you don’t have to stress out much about it.

The big trick is to have a diversity of foods in every meal. A meal shouldn’t be “mostly” any one thing. Instead, we try to mix it up by having some vegetables, some grains, and some proteins (milk, eggs, meats, some vegetables, etc.) in each meal. We don’t worry too much about fats, except that we try to avoid the unhealthy ones (trans fats).

Why do this? There are several reasons. For one, a mixed diet ensures you get the variety of micronutrients that you need. Plus, carbohydrates are usually cheap, but not very filling, while proteins are filling, but usually not cheap. If you balance things and have a variety of things on your plate, you can usually get a pretty filling meal without breaking the bank.

Make Each Meal Plant-Oriented

Plants are cheap and they’re healthy. If you want a healthy and inexpensive food plan for your family, you’ll base it around plants.

Our strategy is to fill more than half of our plates with fruits, vegetables, and legumes. For most meals, we’ll have a main dish along with two sides. Those sides are almost always vegetables, fruits, legumes, or rice, gently seasoned. We try to minimize what we add to those items, particularly when it comes to adding butter or cream or things like that.

In other words, we try to appreciate what the vegetables themselves taste like, not the butter or cream or salt you might add to them. Adding such things makes everything taste like everything else. If you find that you don’t like a particular vegetable, then skip it in the future. Seek out as many different vegetables as you can that you really like in their simplest form so that you don’t need to add all of that unhealthy stuff to them.

How do we do this on the cheap? We just buy what’s on sale, but buy a variety of those items. We’ll basically buy some of every raw vegetable, fruit, dried bean, plain rice, or anything similar that’s on sale that week from the flyer and we’ll plan meals around those items, using them as main dishes and sides.

If anything unusual comes on sale, we absolutely buy it. We never shy away from new things, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables, and we try to make up our minds whether we like them in their simplest form or not.

Another tip: people’s tastes change, so don’t stick to preconceived notions. When I was really little, I loved tomatoes. In my later childhood years, I absolutely hated the things. Now, I love them again. I would have never discovered this change had I not been willing to at least try tomatoes again and give them a fresh chance. Don’t decide that you don’t like something just because you didn’t like it ten or twenty years ago.

One final tip: one bad meal isn’t a disaster. If you use an ingredient to make a meal that you end up not liking, it’s just one meal. It’s not a major loss. It’s still edible and you can just avoid that item next time. Don’t be afraid to try things.

Buy Fresh Vegetables and Fruits In-Season

For us, late summer is the best time of the year. All kinds of different fruits and vegetables are in season in our area and, in a good year, farmers are looking to unload lots of produce quickly. That means bargains.

In-season fruits and vegetables are cheap and fresh. It’s easy to find in-season produce by the pound for just a few dollars. You can make a variety of meals with those items and freeze anything that you can’t use.

Even better than the cheapness is the fact that they also taste incredible. The quicker the time between picking and eating, the better vegetables taste, in my opinion. For example, I’m not a big fan of tomatoes from the grocery store, but if I pick them from our garden, I usually eat a dozen cherry tomatoes before they ever make it in the house. They just taste better.

What if things aren’t in season or aren’t on sale? In those cases, I typically buy frozen fruits and vegetables. They’re surprisingly inexpensive, are often on sale, and taste quite good. I’d far, far rather eat frozen vegetables than canned ones.

Skip Convenience Foods – Or Make Your Own

One of the big draws of the modern diet is convenience. Our time is gobbled up by other things – work, commuting, parenting responsibilities, and so on. It is often really tempting to eat meals as conveniently as possible.

Convenience foods mean you’re paying a premium for the convenience, not just the food. I look at pizza as an example of this. I can make a large pizza very similar to what can be purchased at the pizza shop nearest our house for about $ 5 in ingredients and energy. Alternately, I can spend $ 10 to $ 15 there to buy a large pizza. The difference? Convenience. It’s not even really the “time” issue, since I can pull dough from the freezer and get a pizza in the oven in about fifteen minutes and it’ll be done in fifteen minutes, but it takes 30 minutes to get that ordered pizza. It’s just more convenient to order it – but it really does cost us when we do that.

The same is true for things like hamburgers. You might be able to match the price of a homemade burger on a dollar menu somewhere, but the homemade version tastes better and is far healthier. If you keep some patties frozen in the freezer so that you can pull them out at your convenience and take them straight to the grill, it’s pretty easy to put together some hamburgers at home at your convenience. They’ll be cheap and substantially healthier than fast food fare.

If you really need the convenience, plan ahead and make your own. Our biggest tool in the war against convenience foods is to prep as much in advance as possible.

For example, I’ll make a bunch of pizza dough, wrap the balls of dough in wax paper and a freezer Ziploc, and toss them in the freezer to use in the next month. That way, when we want pizza, I can just pull out that dough and defrost it, roll it out, toss on a few ingredients, and toss it in the oven. Sometimes, I’ll even make full pizzas a day or two in advance, storing them in the refrigerator or freezer.

I’ll often make large batches of beans early in the week in the slow cooker, then use them in two or three meals throughout the week. The beans are already cooked – I just pull out the container, get a few scoops, and add them to whatever I’m making. We do a similar thing with rice, too.

You can also make pure convenience foods in advance. For example, making individually-wrapped “Hot Pockets” doesn’t take too long at all (especially if you’re making a ton at once) and they’re far cheaper than buying them (even on sale), are quite a bit healthier, and (in my opinion) tastier, too.

Have Plenty of Fiber In Your Diet

Fiber isn’t a magic bullet for maintaining a healthy body, but it is very good at making you feel full without adding calories to your diet. There is basically no downside to eating more fiber.

Get fiber by eating whole fruits and vegetables. Get some apples and bananas and eat them as snacks when you’re hungry. They’re more filling than you would expect because of the fiber. Another great strategy in this department – high fiber, relatively low calorie, thus filling you up easily – is to eat some oatmeal for breakfast.

Minimize sources of fiber outside of foods. Due to the benefits to digestive health that fiber provides, many people supplement additional fiber into their diet. There’s no reason to do this. Just choose inexpensive foods that provide plenty of fiber, like apples and oatmeal, and eat them regularly. It’s cheaper and better for you.

Stop Looking at Food as Entertainment

With all the food-related cultural material out there, it’s easy to see food as a source of entertainment, which then encourages you to spend more on it by buying exotic ingredients and eating out at expensive restaurants. Let go of that.

Focus on untying your emotions from what you eat. Food shouldn’t bring you joy. If you feel a strong sense of joy prior to eating a meal, then you need to spend some time thinking about your emotional connection to food. While it’s fine to feel joy about a special occasion – a romantic dinner at a nice restaurant or a great meal with good friends – eating around the house shouldn’t be a source of significant pleasure in your life. If it does, then your emotions are clouding your ability to make good food judgments.

If you go out to eat to “spoil yourself,” make it worthwhile. Instead of eating out regularly at lower-quality restaurants, eat at home more often, skip those restaurants, and eat out on occasion at an exceptional place. If you’re going to eat unhealthy foods, in other words, you should do it less often and be more discerning about the unhealthy foods you consume.

Use a Smarter Plate Strategy

One big challenge with adopting more filling foods (like fiber-rich foods) is that you don’t mentally adjust the amount of food you should put on your plate. It can be really tempting to just eat as much as you used to, but doing so leaves you feeling stuffed and miserable. You can fight that, though.

You don’t have to clean your plate. I was raised on the idea that a person should clean their plate of all food or else. If you didn’t do that, you were being wasteful. In reality, though, leaving behind several bites of food when your body tells you that you are full is a really good move. You might waste a quarter’s worth of food, but you’re also listening to your body. This leads directly to another valuable point.

Put less on your plate to begin with. If you listen to your body and realize that you don’t actually need to eat as much as you usually put on your plate (leaving behind several bites), you’ll start naturally putting less on your plate to begin with. I find it a much smarter strategy to just put a small amount of food on your plate and then go back for more if you assess things later and decide that you’re full.

Nine Foods That Are Healthy, Filling, and Cheap

Want some suggestions on how to fill your grocery cart? Here are nine healthy foods you’ll find all the time in our house, along with some tips on purchasing them inexpensively.

Rice isn’t as cheap as it once was, but in terms of an inexpensive way to spice up meals in many different ways, rice is a powerhouse. Colored rices – brown, black, red, or wild – are better for you, but tend to be a little more expensive. If you can find a discounted deal on bulk brown, black, red, or wild rice, that’s something you should jump for.

Rice can be used in countless ways, from the backbone of a stir fry to the key ingredient in a casserole to a flexible side dish that can be accompanied by almost any spice. We consume rice at least twice a week at our house and consider it a spectacular “bang for the buck” food option.

Beans are absolutely loaded with fiber – which means they do a good job of filling you up – and if you buy dry beans, they’re incredibly inexpensive. A cup of cooked black beans, for instance, provides 30 grams of dietary fiber while only providing 2.8 grams (4% of the daily USDA recommended value) of fat.

In terms of filling you up without breaking the bank and without putting a bunch of junk in your system, it’s pretty hard to beat beans. Plus, they fit well into so many different meals, from a side dish at a barbecue to the core of a delicious burrito.

Oatmeal provides the backbone of many breakfasts at our house. We will often put steel cut oats in a slow cooker just before bed, let them slowly cook overnight, and enjoy a great breakfast in the morning (usually with some fruits added to the oatmeal for a touch of sweetness and nutritional variety).

Oatmeal is an incredible source of fiber and fills you up wonderfully with a surprisingly low calorie count. If you can find steel cut oats at a discount price, it will be one of the best food bargains you’ll find on your grocer’s shelves.

Frozen vegetables are an item that’s on sale all the time at our local grocer. Considering you can often get a pound of vegetables for far less than a dollar, it’s an incredible deal.

Frozen vegetables are generally flash-frozen shortly after picking, so they’re reasonably fresh-tasting and preserve a lot of their nutritional value. They’re usually unseasoned, too, so they can provide a very easy basis for many, many main dishes and work very well for a quick side dish, too.

On-sale fruits and vegetables are a great counterbalance to frozen vegetables, particularly when they’re in season. They’re easier to store (as they don’t require a freezer) and often provide a variety that isn’t available in frozen form.

This is where your local store’s grocery flyer really comes in handy. Check the store’s website and see what kinds of fruits and vegetables they have on sale this week, then use those items as the backbone for a meal plan for the week. This is exactly how Sarah and I plan a week’s worth of meals.

Whole grain pasta is substantially healthier than white pasta as it retains all three parts of the grain (white pasta loses the nutrient-rich bran). It usually sells for the same price and, in my experience, tends to be more filling than white pasta due to the increased amount of fiber.

There is a bit of a texture change from white pasta, but it’s one that you quickly get used to. For me, I find that I can eat about 30% less whole grain pasta and feel just as full.

Eggs are a food that, in moderation, provides tons of wonderful protein at a very low cost. A single egg costs less than a quarter – even if you’re buying cage-free eggs – and it provides a bunch of protein for your diet.

I find that starting a day with a small bowl of oatmeal and a single poached egg is an incredibly easy way to start the day with a lot of energy and leave me feeling content with a very small lunch.

Potatoes sometimes have a poor reputation for healthiness, but that’s mostly because of the incredibly unhealthy things people do to them – frying them, converting them into chips, or slathering them with butter and cream and bacon.

Try eating a baked potato as simply as possible, with just a bit of herbs to season it with. Minimize the salt, cream, and butter and focus on enjoying the potato itself, peel and all. It’s actually quite healthy and very filling.

Tuna is another item that is incredibly cheap and quite healthy and filling when eaten in moderation. I often see sales on multi-packs of canned tuna that brings the price per ounce incredibly low.

Tuna brings some omega-3 fatty acids into your diet and can be eaten in a number of ways. As with any fish, a little is very good for you, but moderation is the key.

If You Take Away One Lesson…

… it’s that the best way to eat cheap and healthy while keeping your stomach full is to eat a variety of things, focusing on fruits, vegetables, beans, and rice, and using your grocery store’s weekly flyer as a guide.

The post Seven Clever Food Strategies for Stretching a Small Food Budget (and Nine Foods That Are Filling, Healthy, and Cheap!) appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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The post Seven Clever Food Strategies for Stretching a Small Food Budget (and Nine Foods That Are Filling, Healthy, and Cheap!) appeared first on FX FOREX.

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Personal Finance, budget, Cheap, Clever, Filling, food, foods, healthy, Nine, Seven, Small, strategies, Stretching

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