Are You Struggling with Your Food Costs?
Credit: Karolina Grabowska via Pexels
Are food costs eating up too much of your paycheck? That’s understandable. The prices for food — whether that food is stacked on grocery store shelves or sitting on restaurant menus — have risen dramatically in recent years. And it’s not like you can skip this expense for the sake of savings. It’s an essential.
So, what can you do to spend less on food this month? Download these apps.
Budgeting Apps
Are you following a budget? If you’re not, you should start now. Creating a budget won’t just give you a better handle on your food costs, but a better handle on all of your expenses throughout the month. The tool will give you spending parameters so that you don’t go overboard and drain your checking account well before your next paycheck arrives.
The easiest way to start a budget is to download one of the top budgeting apps on your smartphone. Follow the app’s step-by-step instructions and then create your one-of-a-kind budget. It’ll be easy.
A budgeting app isn’t the only app that can help you stay on track with your budget. A calendar app can help you, too. Use the calendar app on your smartphone or desktop to build a monthly budget calendar and make notes of your paydays, bill deadlines and personal loan repayment due dates. A budget calendar will hold all of those important financial dates in one place.
Food Waste Apps
You might be shocked to find out just how much food is wasted every day. Grocery stores toss out perfectly good food that customers don’t purchase. Restaurants toss out ingredients and even ready-made meals that don’t get sold. All of these edible items get dumped into the garbage instead of eaten.
If you want to minimize food waste and save some money, you should download certain food waste apps on your smartphone. The app Flashfood can help you get supermarket items at heavily discounted rates. The app Imperfect Foods delivers imperfect groceries (for example, produce that looks irregular) at affordable prices. And the app Too Good to Go gives you the chance to pick up bags of surprise leftovers from restaurants for cheap — it could cost you between $4-$6 per bag.
Recipe Apps
Food waste also happens at home. Did you notice that you always seem to be cleaning out your fridge and tossing perfectly good ingredients into the trash? This is a waste of food and money since you’ll have to rush to the grocery store to restock the fridge again.
You can reduce food waste at home by downloading the right recipe apps. Apps like SuperCook, Allrecipes Dinner Spinner and BigOven can help you find delicious dinner recipes based on the ingredients that are already sitting in your fridge.
Say that you have a container full of leftover broccoli that you cooked the other night, and you don’t want to throw it out. Use one of these apps to get inspired with how to reuse it. Soon you’ll see how you can make a delicious pasta salad, stir fry or skillet bake for dinner. It’s that simple.
Coupon Apps
You shouldn’t be paying for your groceries at full price. You should be using coupons and discount codes whenever you get to the cash register. That should help you trim down your final bill and put more money back in your pocket.
You don’t have to clip coupons the old-fashioned way. There are lots of couponing apps that you can download on your smartphone, like SnipSnap, Rakuten, RetailMeNot and Coupons.com.
Your fridge and your wallet can stay full at the same time. Follow these tips to make that happen!
