How to Save Money by Avoiding Food Delivery?

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By focusing your mind on financial management, it's quite easy to avoid stuff that adds up to your expenses. By sticking to your plan, computation in your mind is on autopilot.

Let's tackle food delivery. As always, we need to lay everything on the table, first. Let's begin.

Why do all hard works, endeavors, and efforts — to save money — rendered futile? Most of us don't see the answer to this question.

One of the reasons happens right at where saving-money disciplines should be adhered the most — at home.

This one culprit of personal financial planning always gets passed over because it hurts one of our cravings.

The culprit I talk about is our temptation to call food delivery service.

• You dial a number.
• An attendant answers to get your order.
• In 30 to 40 minutes, your ordered food is at your doorstep.
• You pay, and a few minutes later, you're enjoying the meal.

Right? That's how food delivery works.

But the question: Is the amount you paid worth the general purpose of filling your stomach?

Now, let's apply our management task to food delivery. We're going to list down the facts and then see how it goes.

Applying financial management to food delivery

Here let's make an inventory, randomly:

1. you want to save money
2. fried chickens cooked deep fry bad for health
3. you just need to wait and then eat
4. too much oil & additives in veggies from fast foods
5. you are too busy to cook
6. you pay extra in food from fast food

Let's take a look at how they're gonna play out.

• You are into saving money for your future and/or your family. Otherwise, you're not reading this blog.
• Every penny counts. It's just your hand are full today, and you're already hungry.
• Or maybe you are a parent, and it's already 11:45 am, and your kids must eat their lunch at noon.
• But you know for a fact that too many additives and too much oil could take the toll on health that would incur health expenses in the future.
• The reality, whatever way we look at it, the food you ordered costs 70% more than the cost of their raw materials.

Verdict: You are not saving money here, period.

See? The impact of imprinting the term “financial management” in our mind is so powerful. It's automatic to get to those arguments and we arrive in the verdict quite easy.

We're just scratching the surface here. Let's continue.

Planning and management of expenses to food such as food delivery avoids the scenario similar to burning money.

Here I will share to you how to get around the negativity of:

• lacking in time
• busyness
• already lunchtime
• tiredness
• etc

You will be able to avoid the temptation to call a food delivery service for your lunch or dinner at home.

Pointers to avoid food delivery

• You are giving out money by ordering food — delivery, cooking, marketing, etc.
• Fast foods are not healthy.
• Deliciousness of fast foods has side effects.
• By the time ordered-food arrived, you will have cooked a nutritious dish.

How to avoid food delivery by instituting financial management?

1. Have items inside fridge remembered

Having your refrigerator full to the brim is one thing. Having to remember what are the items inside is another. Since you can only remember so much, make sure that pata, chicken, shanks, beef, veggies, tomatoes and alliums — garlic, onion, leek, etc. — are top on the list of items that you easily store in the ref and you remember 100% of the time.

2. Have stock of quickly cooked delicious dish

There are a number of dishes that can be cooked pretty fast with a wonder kitchen tool. These are the main dishes which cannot be replaced by any fast food dishes out there. I will discuss how to do that come next number, below. Meanwhile, let me enumerate the dishes that you can quickly cook — mung beans with pata, nilagang pata with cabbage and chicken tinola.

3. Wash & portion meat before refrigerating

When you arrive home from a supermarket, have all the meat & fish washed. Sort them out and divide them into portions. Each portion represents a kind of dish that you will serve per meal for the whole family. Put each portioned meat in a container that you can easily take out of the freezer for cooking.

4. Take out the meat from freezer in advance

Get used to taking out meat from freezer ahead of time to thaw it. It will be as good as — putting inside the pot and turning on the stove — because it doesn't need anymore washing. Now you have two contributing factors — advanced portioning and the thawing. But if yours is no-frost ref, take out a portioned meat and cook.

5. Use the wonder pot — pressure-cooker

Consider this: The meat is ready to be cooked. You have already double-timed there. Now the pressure cooker will even speed up your cooking that it will beat the delivery time of any fast food. The pressure-cooker is an amazing invention. Food cooked in a pressure-cooker is healthier as quality, texture, and nutrients are retained. Natural oil of meat helps in giving dishes deliciously and flavorful taste. Cap that with faster cooking time.

Below are simple instructions on how to cook 3-delicious dishes fast.

3-dishes you can cook in less than 20 minutes

1. Chicken tinola

1. Dip the tinola-cut chicken into the pressure-cooker with the right amount of water for tinola.
2. Add ginger, garlic, onion, and the optional — granule seasoning. I use fish sauce only.
3. Put the pot in the stove and turn on the fire.
4. Pressure cook for 10-minutes or from the time it whistles and air-vent slides up.
5. Use the — quick release button — to release pressure in few minutes after which add chayote and let it boil once and serve.

2. Mung beans with beef shanks

1. No need to boil mung beans to soften it.
2. In a pressure-cooker with estimated water for the meal, dip mung beans, beef shank and all ingredients — alliums, tomatoes and the optional granules-seasoning.
3. Pressure cook for 15-minutes.
4. After releasing pressure, open it and add bitter gourd leaves or pepper leaves. Stir. Taste.
5. Once it boiled anew, it's ready to serve.

3. Nilagang Pata with Cabbage

1. Take the portioned pata for nilaga and put them in the pressure-cooker.
2. Add water just enough to cover them.
3. There's too much fat in pata, so make sure water is not too much as it will come out during cooking.
4. Add black pepper, alliums and granule seasoning — optional.
5. Pressure cook for 12 minutes.
6. Once done, add the water needed for the meal.
7. Let it boil in high heat. Add cabbage, stir and serve.

The steps mentioned above are enough to have a delicious dish for a meal. It trumps whatever good taste any fast food brags in their advertisements.

Now there's no need for me to explain about the rice, right?

Obviously, you know that you can cook rice in minutes.

So, while you're cooking the dish, I bet that it is automatic for you to attend to your rice cooker.

And rice will be cooked ahead of the dish.

But some families have microwave ovens. And they have cooked rice in the ref from last night.

So, it is even more out of the question to call food delivery.

My Story

Once, I woke up at 11:43 am. As a blogger, it is my habit to do blog related tasks all night. And going to bed at 6 am is ordinary.

I was hungry then upon waking up. But I am a frugal person. I want to save money.

So, instead of dialing a food delivery number, I did the right thing.

I just put mung beans with pre-cut beef, tomatoes and alliums in half-full water small pressure cooker, added salt & pepper and pressure cooked it.

After 10 minutes, I turned off the heat and released the pressure the "quick method" way that I know — prodding the pressure regulator to different directions with ladle's opposite end.

At no time "air vent" slid. I added cut bitter gourd or ampalaya which I prefer than its leaves. Minutes after I was eating my lunch at 12:05 pm.

I was very thankful after having my brunch. I was glad that I didn't pick up the phone.

I got to eat deliciously and satisfied. Amazingly, it struck me to realize how fast I prepared my brunch.

To be honest, I thought of giving-in and dialed food delivery because I was already hungry. But I had cooked rice in the ref, the microwave is above it, and raw food materials cost money. Furthermore, what's the point of learning ways on how to save money if I don't apply them to me.

Conclusion

It takes awareness that you have a management plan for your finance integrated into your home-living to avoid unnecessary expenses such as the hidden costs of food delivery.

You will see the negatives, which are so many, of food deliveries outright, especially the costs of long term effects of additives. And the more you hold to your financial management, the more you see the plus and positives of cooking fast over having lunch through food delivery.

Do you call a food delivery service from time to time? How often do you call food delivery? On the other hand, do you stick to the food in your home, and avoid food delivery? Share with us in comments' below.

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Vernie Mallorca

Vernie Mallorca is an entrepreneur and blogger with years of experience in selling to institutional accounts. He gradually shifted to blogging when he found out that it is his calling to write timely and helpful articles online that can help others to save money, make money, and secure their future by handling their income smartly. In this blog, he shares both managing your finances, however small it is and valuable information on running a small business.