16 Mar An Empty Fridge is a Happy Fridge

A fridge overly full of food makes me cringe, uncomfortable, and instantly causes me to wonder about expiration dates.  Growing up I thought a fridge full of food meant you were rich, because you had, well, a ton of food.  I can’t say I remember ever wondering where my next meal was going to come from growing up but we did make our fair share of trips to a food self, or see the fridge very bare at times growing up.  When I’d visit others’ homes and the fridge was just jam packed with stuff (often like 6 kinds of one specific condiment) I just assumed that meant wealth when really it just meant wealth was being dumped down the drain via expired jars of mayonnaise, unused vegetables, and other random things that would never be consumed and eventually tossed.

Fast to forward to today and my wife is a food scientist, and our grocery shopper. We didn’t live together prior to being married so I always lived with roommates and thus our fridge was always packed with 3-4 guys having their own quadrant of the fridge full of their specific crap.  It wasn’t until we got married and those first few grocery store trips happened that I always scratched my head at how empty our fridge was, but I never felt like it meant we were poor.  It feels weird t say that last sentence out loud or put it into writing but here’s the deal, I know at least one other person that thinks the exact same way as I do, and if they do, then others do and this all resonates with someone out there.  My wife is an excellent shopper, she buys what we need to get through a week and that’s that.  A crowded fridge makes her cringe, uncomfortable, and instantly causes her to wonder about expiration dates, sound familiar?  Its her fault I feel this way, but it’s a fault of hers that I’m thankful for because it means we aren’t throwing money away on superfluous items that were never to be consumed.  So what do we eat, and how much do we spend on groceries?

This is one of those “purge to splurge” moments in my life where I don’t actually know for sure how much we spend but we’ve added up a few receipts every so often to keep it in check.  I have a general ballpark of what we spend but she shops at Target for groceries and gets various items from other stores here or there but the target receipt is the big one but also comes with non-grocery items and I’m not going through and manually adding that up, as long as its reasonable, I just don’t care honestly.  We spend somewhere around $750-850 per month for the two of us and our soon to be 4 year old son.  That is a tad on the high side  and I’m sure we could cut $100 consistently if we tried but frankly, we like to eat well, food is my wifes love language, and I am a food snob.  We don’t have a ton of snacks, and processed things that make up our spending monthly, its high quality meat including grass fed in some cases, vegetables, fruits, and other things that make up and compliment the meals we eat at home nightly.  Additionally its worth noting that the monthly spend does include us eating 100% of our lunches made from home versus eating out, so if you were to add in the couple dinners a month we have here or there our food budget would increase but our grocery budget is in the range above.

We could probably spend a bit less buying what we consider “crap food” (sorry, not sorry) that falls in the processed category or essentially anything pre-made that you can make yourself with little to no effort.  For example, we don’t eat whole grain triscuit crackers or some other allegedly healthy based on product label and advertising snacks, we do however keep almond crackers on hand.  We don’t have boxes of cookies or other sugar loaded treats around but we do buy dark chocolate covered almonds or things like that which fall in the reasonably healthy category and my wife always keeps what I lovingly refer to as “freezer treats” in the freezer for me.  Freezer treats are paleo friendly brownies, cookies, bars, and other random sweets that don’t break the code of paleo and I can eat one every night with some peanut butter (nope, not paleo and don’t care) or just straight up.  I get my fix, its not trash for my body and its more affordable as its made at home.

I often hear from people that they “can’t make their lunch every day” because they would have to go grocery shopping.  Huh? Like legitimately I’ve heard that from multiple people so I ask them what they eat for other meals and it’s a combination heavily in favor of eating out nearly every meal, and super easy things to cook at home like Brat’s or something along those lines.  Listen to enough podcasts about peoples financial journey toward FI and you’ll hear a common theme of them having no idea how much money they spent eating out until they looked at it and added it all up.  My suggestion would be to do just that, total up and add up all your eating out including tips and alcohol, cry a little when you see the number and then write a grocery list with your tears.  You’d be better off ordering from SHIPT or doing a curbside pickup for a premium price and eating at home than you would continuing the nonsense of eating out most meals and your novel made at home meal is a brat.  Rant over.

I’ll give credit to the non-lunch from home people because they either don’t know how to food prep or don’t know what they’d want to eat that week.  Our house is fairly simple, we each have two different styles of lunch.  My wife cooks dinner for Sunday night which also covers her lunch Monday, and our dinner Monday night.  Her lunch on Tuesday? I have no idea, but the cycle continues as above for dinners and lunches.  I’m a little different, I smoke chicken on my smoker every other week, cut it into little pieces and it goes into zip lock bags into the freezer.  My wife makes me a salad two days at a time ready to go, I bring a banana and a homemade Lara Bar.  I eat that every day and have for 5 years.  The flavor of the salad changes every week, but the fact that I eat a chicken salad every week legitimately has not changed for 5 years, maybe more like 7 or 8.  If you aren’t making lunch from home yet I’d suggest something really simple like grilling a few chicken breasts, and cooking a simple vegetable like green beans or something that you an eat cold if you are like me (eating in my car while out working), or microwave and be good to go, and some other side item.  If you can’t spend 25 minutes to prep and grill 5 pieces of chicken at once, let it cool, it in a bag and then the freezer, and while the chicken is cooking steam, bake, or air fry a simple vegetable, then I can’t help you.  More often than not the “I don’t have time” crowd, is actually wasting far more time driving to lunch, eating there, socializing if they went with friends, and commuting back than we’ll ever have spent meal prepping and eating wherever we work.

You can eat what is in your fridge or your fridge can eat up and spit out your bank account.  You choose.  We are very aware that we are incredibly fortunate in our house that not only does my wife enjoy cooking, but she’s excellent at it and knows how to get everything right from a quantity and price standpoint to optimize our obsession with excellent food and our desire to achieve FI.  If you aren’t sure what healthy eating looks like, there are a million opinions out there, personally we subscribe to the Paleo diet primarily and stick to it about 80-90%.  If you aren’t sure if you can do Paleo or some version of it, just try and maybe commit to your lunches or dinners following the plan only for a couple weeks.  Eventually you’ll retrain your mind and taste buds to only crave the best.  If you are just getting started on food prep and eating at home, keep it simple.  Trade in your Instagram or facebook scrolling for a couple weeks to receipe research and build yourself a word doc of links to things you want to try.  Its not all that hard, it takes discipline in the beginning but eventually it just becomes habit and lifestyle and no longer a “diet” but simply a way of living.  Best wishes, empty out that fridge folks.