Ten Frugal Living Tips To Slash Your Food Spending

Last month I did a post all about frugal living, but here are some specific frugal living tips to help you on your journey.

In the UK we throw away a lot of food which is not only a waste of both food and money, but it’s harmful to the world around us.

So by not wasting food, you’re helping both your pocket and the environment. Here are some frugal living tips to help you slash your food spending.

Make a food inventory

Go through your cupboards, fridge and freezer and take stock of all the food you have. Once you know what you have you can create meal ideas around those. I’m the worst for this when it comes to the freezer and end up buying fresh even though I’ve got it in the freezer.

Make a weekly menu

If you know what you’ll be eating throughout the week you’ll know what items you need to buy. We used to eat a lot more takeaways before I meal planned, and this ended up costing us so much money.

When you go food shopping you’ll have a specific list of those meals during the week so there should be less impulse buying.

Frugal living tips- use a meal planning app

I use the app Whisk to plan our meals. You can input your own recipes, choose from thousands on the app or even paste links into the app from other websites and it will pull through the ingredients list and method.

You can add meals to your planner not only to create a virtual meal plan but also to put everything into one massive shopping list. I do this and then tick off the things I already have so I know I’m only buying what we need.

Batch cook and fill up your freezer

One of the best frugal living tips I can suggest, especially if you live alone, is batch cooking. You don’t need to make one massive dish on a Sunday and only eat that all week, but you can divide it up and freeze meals to have on days when you can’t be bothered to cook, or you just need a quick meal.

Freeze items to save them from going bad

Some items don’t last all that long, and it’s a waste to throw them away, but there are loads of things you can freeze that you may not have thought about.

I used to freeze bread when I lived on my own as I couldn’t get through a loaf of bread on my own. When me and Luke buy citrus fruits to use in drinks we cut them up and freeze them as we don’t drink enough to use them all up.

You can freeze all sorts of things including fresh herbs and milk.

Frugal living tips- learn to bake bread

This is one we’ve yet to try out ourselves as we’re pretty lazy, but it can be cheaper to make your own bread than to buy it fresh. I’m always jealous when I see people’s freshly made focaccia or sourdough loaves. So this is the tip I’ll be starting on myself.

Use cooking by-products and leftovers

Not every part of an item will be useable but don’t throw out things you can use. We keep meat bones to boil into stock after we’ve cooked.

This includes leftovers, save anything extra so you can freeze it for another day or have it for lunch.

Eat more vegetarian meals

While the price of everything has gone up meat can be very expensive so swap out a few vegetarian meals a week to save money. Try using beans, pulses and lentils for a filling meal.

Frugal living tips- invest in an air fryer

An air fryer has been a game changer in our household when it comes to energy usage when cooking. It would cost us quite a lot of money to use the oven, but when we switched to the air fryer it used a fraction of the energy. And the food tastes just as good (if not better).  There are very few things that we now use the oven for.

We opted to spend a little more on our air fryer so we could get the most use out of it. So we picked one with two different cooking areas so we could cook two things at different temperatures and times together.

Look for early dinner specials and set menus when going out

On the occasions when you do go out to eat look for set menus or early dinner specials. We’ve seen quite a few places around us offer special prices before 5 pm, a few weeks ago we had a three-course meal for £15 each.

Do you have any frugal living tips to save on food?

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