Time = Money
If there is one thing that has helped us to live more frugally – in a happy, contented, non-miserly way – it was getting our heads around the fact that time is money, particularly where food is concerned.
It’s pretty simple maths:
Least Time Spent → Most Time Spent
Eating Out → Cooking Prepared Meals → Making From Scratch
Most Expensive → Least Expensive
We’ve found that the more time we can put into preparing our food, the more we can afford to spend on really great ingredients, while still saving quite a bit of money (understand, of course, that we’re not buying truffles or organic lamb backstrap on a regular basis).
Here’s a personal example:
We used to (and still occasionally do) buy takeaway pizzas. They were (and still are) very good, but expensive.
Five years ago, we started making our own at home, using supermarket ingredients: McCain’s frozen pizza bases, Leggo’s pizza sauce, shredded cheese out of a bag, pitted Spanish olives from a jar and ham in little packets from the cold section.
Now we make our own pizza bases from flour, yeast and extra virgin olive oil, and top them with homemade roasted tomato passata, marinated Kalamata olives, hand sliced fresh mozzarella, dry cured pancetta and Italian anchovy fillets.
The more time we’ve spent on the pizza we’ve eaten, the less money it’s cost, even with the substantial increase in quality of the raw materials. That makes sense, because when we have a takeaway pizza, we’re paying for someone to process our food for us, which saves us time. Even our first attempts at homemade pizza cost us more than our pizzas do now, because there was still an element of processing – someone else made the bases, grated the cheese and prepared the sauce.
Now, were we to have the time to plant, harvest and mill our own flour, grow our own tomatoes and raise our own meat, we could probably reduce the cost of our food even further. But that’s not an option currently available to us, nor one we would necessarily like to take up!
This post isn’t intended to make you feel guilty about how much food prep you do or don’t do. We’re blessed to have the time and inclination to try and make things from scratch, but someone who works 60 hours a week is unlikely to have the energy to turn a box of tomatoes into sauce. Every family needs to find the time-money balance that suits their lifestyle.
But the knowledge that what you’re paying for in food is often time, rather than ingredients, might help you to make more informed decisions about where your food dollars are spent. And maybe you’ll be able to find painless ways to save money, by doing small things which don’t feel like a chore. It might not be much, but every little bit makes a difference!
. . . . .
Click here for more Frugal Living posts
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
And don’t forget that you are also eating healthier – even if it is pizza – there are none of those weird chemicals in your food. Just olives, cheese and anchovy. Got to be a far healthier option long-term. I am loving the blog, Celia!
Thanks Amanda! Agree completely – part of the reason we started making our own was because of Small Man’s allergies – we wanted to get as many preservatives and chemicals out of his diet as possible. That’s hard to do completely, but at least we’re much more aware of what we’re eating these days.
What a great, clear presentation of this important information! The other thing I’ve noticed is that, once you get into the routine of processing your own ingredients, often it actually starts to take less time–either because you get better at it, or because you find ways to multitask. Roasting tomatoes and making sauce, for example, can take hours, but you don’t have to stand over it the whole time. Once you’ve prepped and started it, you really just need to be nearby, doing other things and checking in occasionally.
Thanks for that, Nancy, you’re absolutely right – once things become routine, they don’t seem to be that laborious. But now that I understand about time and money, I also don’t begrudge paying for bottled passata when life is hectic! Of course, the downside now is that the boys don’t like the taste of it… :)
Also, the thing people often don’t realise is that even if you don’t have the time to process food from scratch, you can usually still save money by choosing food which is less processed. Using tomatoes as an example, a 700g bottle of passata (which is basically tomatoes which have been skinned, pureed and heat treated) might cost $2, whereas a 150g tub of pizza sauce (which has been further “value-added” with herbs and spices etc), might cost $1.50. We’re not talking huge savings, but I think there’s a two-fold benefit here – all the little dollars add up, AND eating less commercially processed food has got to be healthier!
Thanks again for chiming in – I’m looking forward to reading about your adventures in Kansas! :)
Celia
frugal delight – a la Celia – No 1 in an occasional series
small puddings for two people…
Take 4 elderly passion fruit (on special offer)
find small box of chocolate swiss roll trimmings from Christmas birthday cake in the freezer
place these in bottom of dish
and cover with passion fruit pulp
Add a couple of teaspoons of triple sec
Peel elderly bananas with brown skins
Slice and arrange on top of passion fruit
Investigate fridge for dairy products
find small container of double cream
and some low fat yoghurt
take some of each
add a swoosh of icing sugar
beat to soft peaks
plop on top of everything else
in an artistic way
chill in fridge while eating dinner,
top with chocolate sprinkles
serve to one’s beloved, ‘I made this specially for you!!!’
et voila passionfruit tiratrifle frugal surprise
You spoil that man, Jo….hahaha
Forgot to say, which was the point, it took ten minutes to make, the same sort of thing, in a pretty box and two little glass pots and lots of packaging from the supermarket costs maybe £4.00 plus fuel and time, so I reckon I was winning at that point on the time/money axis! I contrast this with the time I spend looking for coveted ingredients to make things with, but I excuse that as research time….:)
Aaah, but that’s the thing, right? When you’re hunting down special ingredients, you’re spending your time in a way you enjoy.. :)
Your passionfruit tiratrifle has incorporated some homemade cake (was that the brandy chocolate one?), fresh fruit that would otherwise have been wasted, and lightened the fat content by mixing yoghurt with the cream. Plus you didn’t have to pay four quid, get dressed and made up, and drive to the shops!
I’m so glad I came across this post! I have dietary restrictions and so make just about all my food from scratch (I buy noodles and pasta but the rest I make). I began to worry about how much I was spending because I was always at the store buying ingredients. Recently I started doing the sums and came to the same opinion. Even when I go out of my way to get something extra nice to add into my recipe (e.g. saffron or real vanilla essence) it *still* ends up being cheaper than eating out.
It’s so nice to know someone else’s sums came out this way too! (Maths never was my best subject.)