Take Back Your Finances #21: Implement Dinner by 10 and Meal Prep

Are you ready to learn about the next task for the Take Back Your Finances Challenge? This is another fun one…I mean anything involving food, eating healthier and cutting the grocery budget is far too exciting for anyone. 🙂

Seriously though, it is really freeing to be able to take such control of the grocery budget.  And that has been our focus the past few weeks on the challenge.

Well, this week’s task is no exception. We are going to either introduce (or re-introduce for our seasoned readers) you to a very easy, yet innovative concept when it comes to ensuring you eat at home and save money (not to mention health).

That is our very popular Dinner By 10 concept. Have you heard of it?  We introduced this concept about 5 years ago as it was one little step that ultimately helped us to save big by ensuring we ate at home and not have the last minute rut of “I don’t know what I can make last minute, so I guess we will pick something up.”

This concept has been so popular that it has been featured in a national magazine!

Excerpt from All You Magazine

What is Dinner by 10?  Well the above magazine excerpt gives a very brief explanation, but we will elaborate here.

What this means is that by 10 am, you will know what you are making for dinner. This gives adequate time to defrost, prep, cook/slow-cook (whatever your plans for dinner are) – and this is usually more than enough time. This prevents the last minute eating out dilemma.

The beauty of this simple trick is that it works whether you have a planned menu or not. As you know, merely having a menu planned means nothing if you don’t actually look at it and prepare the food. Yes, having a menu planned makes the all important Dinner by 10 plan much more smooth and shorter than having to rummage through your fridge/freezer/pantry to make a plan, but even if you had to do the rummaging, doing it at 10 am will save you at 6pm.

And for those that are not home during the day or are working, just simply make your 10 o’clock time at 10pm the night before. Same trick, same task, same savings – still Dinner by 10. 🙂

Now to make this even more slick for you, especially if you have a tendency to have a busy week (working, running kids around, taking care of errands, etc.) then planning your menu and prepping the foods beforehand can save you big time.

What we mean on this second aspect of this week’s task…whatever day is your slowest of the week, take some time in the kitchen to cut-up the veggies and place them in containers in your fridge, prepare snacks and even get the meats out of the freezer for the week. Just be prepared.

Then when 10am (or 10pm) hits, get those out and get cooking/prepping!

This task is designed to eliminate the most common excuses for the last minute, unplanned eating out! 

Once you have done this a few times, this will become habit and second nature. It’s really great to see how these steps saves your budget big time.

Need to catch up?  Come join us on this challenge from the very beginning by clicking on the 52-Week Take Back Your Finances Challenge and sign up to start receiving your automated challenge from the very beginning!

One final thing…we also have a Facebook Group where you can engage in discussions, receive encouragement and talk to others that are participating in the challenges too for more ideas! Head to the Be Intentional with The Thrifty Couple Facebook Page HERE and ask to join us there! You can also invite friends and spouses too!