Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

5 Strategies to Make Food at Home If You Hate Cooking

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For some, cooking is a joy and a way to relax after a long, hard day. For others, cooking is a daily task that must be done to save money and fuel their bodies. And then for others, cooking is one of the worst tasks they have to do and one they avoid as much as possible by eating out, picking up food, or getting an invite to someone else’s house who is doing the cooking.

If you’re in the latter group of people, you’re not alone. However, if you utilize these five strategies to make food at home when you hate cooking, you’ll find that you’ll save a considerable amount of money on your food budget, and you’ll likely be eating better.

Pick “Dump” Meals

Sure, the name is unappetizing, but “dump” refers to meals where you just put the food in the InstaPot or slow cooker and walk away. One example might be a few chicken breasts, black beans, corn, and salsa. Cook in the slow cooker for a few hours, shred the chicken, and serve over rice.

Pinterest and YouTube have plenty of dump meals; you could make several and put some in your freezer, making dinner prep even easier.

Use Premade Food

Most stores have some type of pre-made food you can use. Down the freezer aisle, you’ll find pre-made meals for a family that you just have to put in your slow cooker or cook on the stove; all of the ingredients that you need are in the bag.

Likewise, you can buy already chopped vegetables from the salad bar and rotisserie chicken that’s already been pulled from the bone to make meal time prep faster.

Premade salad bar ingredients for people who hate to cook.

Order a Meal Kit Delivery Service

There are many meal kit delivery services available such as Blue Apron, Green Chef, and HelloFresh, to name a few, each with their own specialty. In your kit, you’ll receive all of the ingredients you need for the meals as well as a card that tells you how to make the meal. With a meal kit delivery service, you avoid the headache of grocery shopping and get to try a new meal.

Make a Few Meals in Advance on Sunday

Another option for those who hate cooking is to make a few meals on Sunday. Then, when you come home on Monday, you don’t have to cook at all. Simply pull out the meal you already made and reheat it. While you do still have to cook with this option, you only have to cook one day, and then you get several days off when you eat the meals you cooked on Sunday.

Pick Easy Meals

No one says you have to have fancy dinners. Scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit can do just fine and require minimal cooking and clean up.

Easy meals for people who don't like to cook.

If you hate cooking, don’t feel the need to resort to eating out every night. Instead, try one of these five strategies to make food at home when you hate cooking.

If you hate cooking, what strategies do you use to still eat at home but limit the amount of time you have to cook?

Would You Pay $25 a Pound for Vegetables?

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My husband and I have been trying to garden for a year now.  I say trying because we recently relocated to Tucson, Arizona, and gardening here has a STEEP learning curve.  However, it’s something we both enjoy, so we’ve kept at it, and we’re finally starting to see some rewards. Due to our gardening failures while learning to garden in a new climate, we’re currently paying about $25 a pound for vegetables, but I’m okay with that because I know this hobby will likely pay for itself eventually.

Those Gardening Expenses

Vegetables for $25 a pound?
$25 a pound for Vegetables?

Starting our garden has not been cheap.  We had to create three garden beds, which included the dirt, the pavers for the sides (they’re slightly raised garden beds), and the soil amendment.

We planted in October when the temperatures finally dropped into the 80s, but we planted the wrong vegetables for the season, and we planted in a shady spot when we should have planted in full sun.

All we ended up with last winter was one kale, one Swiss chard, and two lettuce plants.

In the spring, we planted tomatoes that were just starting to blossom when the summer hit with 100+ degree days and scorching sun.  We covered the tomato plants with a homemade sun shade, but we only got 6 cherry tomatoes.  All summer long they didn’t even flower.

Next, we amended the soil further and planted watermelon and cantaloupe starts.  Every time a baby watermelon developed, one of the many birds in our yard ate it.  This continued until September when the birds finally went away.  Since then, we’ve gotten 4 watermelons.

Now, it’s fall, and we are finally getting some produce.  We have baby bok choy that are growing strong, 4 Swiss chard plants, and 8 green pepper plants that have more than 20 peppers on them in various states of growth.

Hopefully our costs will drop or moderate as we learn more about how to garden in the desert.  However, so far, we’ve easily spent $200 for the few veggies we’ve been able to harvest.

Sticking It Out Through the Learning Curve

For someone like me who doesn’t like to spend money frivolously, these gardening expenses bother me.  But there are two reasons we keep trying to garden:

My husband really enjoys it.  I think my husband has discovered his inner farmer.  He loves spending weekends outdoors, puttering in the garden.  Every evening, he comes home from work and waters and takes care of the garden.  It’s a great hobby for him.

The costs should equalize–eventually.  As we learn more about gardening here, we should be able to produce more vegetables.  We won’t have to create the raised beds again.  Our only expenses going forward will be soil amendment each season (so necessary with our desert soil), seeds, and water.  The longer we garden, the lower our costs should be.

Even though it doesn’t feel like it now, gardening will eventually be a hobby that at least costs us only a small amount out of pocket or that pays for itself.

Do you garden?  How steep was your learning curve?  Do you find that the garden pays for itself eventually?

 

Why You May Not Want To Install A Pool This Summer

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What better way is there to beat the heat than to take a nice, refreshing dip in a pool.  Ah.  It doesn’t get better than that.  But if you have kids, you may find paying a fee to use the local pool and carting the kids to the pool a bit of a pain, especially when they get back in the car to go home dripping wet.

Perhaps you’ve toyed with the idea of installing a pool at your house.  You may think that the kids would enjoy it, they could have friends over, you could use it for exercise, and it will increase your property value because who doesn’t want a pool at home, right?

Slow down and rethink that decision.

Here’s why you shouldn’t install a pool at home:

install a pool this summer
You may not want to install a pool this summer.

Pools are expensive.  There’s the initial expensive of putting in the pool, which is quite a hefty sum.  “PK Data reports that the average cost of a residential in-ground swimming pool was $39,084. . .” (Money).  Depending on where you live, you’ll also need to pay for a fence around the pool as well as a lock.  There may also be additional home insurance costs since a pool is a liability.  But, of course, the expenses don’t stop there.  There is the cost of maintaining the pool, the chemicals to treat the pool, the expense of opening and closing the pool yearly.  You’ll also likely see a spike in your utilities thanks to the pump and heater.

The neighborhood kids may not hang out at your house.  Many parents of teens want a pool because they think that their child will invite his friends over.  While that may be true, often teens want to hang out at the community pool or the beach where there are more teens.

Your kids may tire of the pool.  While your children may initially enjoy the pool and spend hours swimming and playing in it, like almost everything, their attention may wane.  It’s not unusual for kids to hardly swim in the pool once they’ve had it for several years.

Other neighbors may visit frequently.  You may also find yourself getting unwanted neighborly visits.  My cousin’s friend, Renee, had a pool, and almost every day a neighbor boy and his mom would stop by asking if they could swim.  Never mind that Renee had no children herself.  Every day she was placed in the uncomfortable position of either denying them or playing reluctant host to uninvited guests.

It likely won’t add any value to your home.  One reason some people get a pool is that they figure the investment will pay for itself when they sell the house.  Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.  “Sabine H. Schoenberg, a home improvement expert and founder of SabinesHome.com” states, “It’s not something that’s value-enhancing to a lot of people.  Just as there are people with positive feeling towards pools, there are those with negative feelings” (Money).

It can be expensive to fill in.  If you reach the time where you want to fill in the pool, you could be looking at $8,000 or more!

When we were in the market for a house, we looked at one that had a pool.  However, after researching all of the costs, I’m so glad we decided to get a house without a pool!

Which do you prefer?  A house with or without a pool?  Are you considering adding a pool to your backyard?