The problem? That moment rarely comes when or how we expect. And while we wait, life keeps moving. Dreams shrink. Health and youthful drive fade. Bad habits become muscle memory. The next chapter silently slips further away.

Many of us assume that the next chapter in life will start when it “should.” That someday, when the work slows down, the schedule clears, or a milestone arrives, life will suddenly feel easier, freer, more meaningful. We expect clarity to appear overnight, as if decades of routine will magically transform into the life we’ve imagined.

That is a trap.

We liked our work. But we also knew something simple: it wouldn’t last forever. Roles change. Energy changes. Health changes. Change is inevitable. Waiting for retirement or a distant “someday” to build the next chapter is risky—and uninspiring. We weren’t interested in sitting back and watching the days go by.

Recognizing the Trap

We’ve seen this pattern before. When we made a major career change in the past, we fell into the same mental trap most people do: thinking clarity would arrive after the leap. In reality, clarity comes from the work we do before and after a transition, not from the moment of change. That experience taught us to recognize the trap early when thinking about the next chapter.

The key lesson: your next chapter doesn’t have to wait. You don’t need to start from scratch at retirement.

Step 1: Stop Assuming Your Future Self Is a Different Person

The next chapter isn’t about reinventing yourself completely. Growth expands you, but it doesn’t erase your core interests. Your future self shouldn’t be a stranger. Pay attention to what consistently pulls you in—skills, hobbies, or projects you keep returning to.

Step 2: Take Stock and Identify the Delta

Start by listing the habits, skills, interests, and projects you’ve been consistently investing in. Then compare this inventory to the life you imagine. Where is the gap? What is missing?

The bigger the gap, the more dangerous the trap becomes. A large gap can make the future feel overwhelming, strengthening the temptation to wait for “someday” rather than act now.

Once you see the delta, you can create a focused plan of small, consistent actions to move the ball forward. That clarity prevents wasted effort on dramatic leaps and ensures progress compounds over time.

Step 3: Move the Ball Forward Every Day

If something matters enough to anchor your future, it deserves structured time in your present. Even 30 minutes a day dedicated to a skill, interest, or project compounds faster than waiting for a someday leap. Skills deepen. Confidence grows. Options multiply. That is how you avoid the Hail Mary.

Reframing the next chapter as something you build gradually takes the pressure off. The question shifts from “What will I do someday?” to “What deserves more reps this week?” That is tactical, actionable, and repeatable.

You don’t need to leave work you enjoy to prepare for what comes next. In fact, work you enjoy can fund and stabilize the next chapter if approached intentionally.

Build Your Next Chapter: 3-Step Action Framework

Step 1: Stop Assuming Your Future Self Is Different

Growth expands you; it doesn’t erase your core interests. So, start by identifying the skills, habits, and projects you keep returning to.

Step 2: Take Stock & Identify the Delta

First, list what you’re already investing time in. Next, compare it to the life you want. The bigger the gap, the more dangerous the “someday” trap becomes. Then, focus on small, consistent actions to close that gap.

Step 3: Move the Ball Forward Every Day

Even 30 minutes a day compounds faster than waiting for “someday.” Over time, building gradually, measuring progress, and iterating creates real momentum. Finally, reframe the question: “What deserves more reps this week?”

At this point, you’ve already begun taking actionable steps toward your next chapter. But there’s another trap that can quietly undermine progress if left unexamined.

Avoid the “It Will Be Better When” Trap

The real trap is the phrase “It will be better when we…”

• Retire
• Have more time
• Are focused on ourselves

Ultimately, time does not create clarity. Action does.

To get started, consider a simple filter:

• Find what you already spend time on that could scale?
• What skill are you quietly building?
• What interest keeps resurfacing year after year?
• Where can you commit to little, consistent progress instead of a future leap?

Chances are, that is already your next chapter in early form.

Build a Next Chapter You’ll Actually Enjoy

Wrapping Up

Your next chapter should not feel like a stranger. It should feel like a more developed version of who you already are. However, if it feels disconnected from your current habits and interests, reassess the vision. The goal is alignment, not escape.

We recognized that attempting a ‘Hail Mary’ pass into the end zone at the last minute is a trap. That is how we used to think of our future. Instead, we are moving the ball now, a few yards at a time. Measured risk. Compounding effort. So, start moving the ball today. Your next chapter doesn’t have to wait for a distant someday—it’s being built in the choices you make now.

The Future:
Don’t imagine it-
-Build It

The post How to Break the Golden Years Trap first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Important: While this facial scrub is made with largely natural ingredients, allergic reactions are always possible. Facial skin, especially around the eyes, is sensitive.

• Test a small area of skin in a less sensitive area, such as your arm, before applying it to your face.
• Avoid direct contact with the eyes or the mouth
• Those with nut allergies should use extra caution, as coconut oil is a primary ingredient

We originally used this scrub occasionally to treat irritated, very dry skin, serving as both an exfoliant and a moisturizer. Over time, one of us began using it daily with great results. Because coconut oil is the base, it can help or worsen acne depending on skin type and use. We do include castor oil and honey to help balance it. As with most skincare, results depend on context, since skin is highly personal. Let your skin’s response guide how often you use this scrub.

Let’s get to the ingredients

Here is what you will need:

• Dark Brown Sugar – 1 cup
• Coconut Oil – ½ cup
• Sea Salt – 1 tbsp
• Castor Oil -1 tbsp
• Vitamin E oil -1 tsp
• Arrowroot Powder – ½ tsp
• Dried Comfrey – ½ cup
• Honey – 1 tbsp
• Essential Oils – 30 drops +/-

The Why Breakdown

Each ingredient in this scrub serves a specific purpose. Some benefits are supported by research, others by long-standing traditional use. For us, the deciding factor is simple: it works.

Dark brown sugar provides gentle exfoliation, helping remove dead skin without being overly abrasive.

Sea salt adds exfoliating grit and helps reduce spoilage due to its natural preservative properties.

Coconut oil moisturizes and helps restore the skin barrier, making it especially useful for dry, irritated skin.

Castor oil balances coconut oil, offering anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.

Vitamin E oil helps prevent moisture loss, softens skin, and supports skin repair.

Honey helps draw moisture into the skin and offers anti-inflammatory and antibacterial benefits.

Comfrey helps soothe and soften skin and supports hydration.

Arrowroot powder reduces the greasy feel of the scrub and helps improve overall texture.

Essential oils add scent and provide aromatherapy benefits, depending on the oils selected.

We recommend using organic and all-natural sources to ensure they maintain their full strength. The reality is, though, that it can get cost-prohibitive for some. We have written a couple of articles about what organic means and what it doesn’t. If you need to cut costs, do so; we have at times as well and haven’t noticed a significant difference.

Essential Oils

Essential oils let you customize this scrub for your intended use. For a morning scrub, brighter scents like eucalyptus, lemongrass, and tea tree work well. For evening use, softer options such as chamomile, rose, and lavender are more calming.

Use caution when selecting oils. Some essential oils, including cinnamon, clove, and peppermint, can irritate sensitive skin and are unsafe if they come into contact with the eyes. If you are unsure about an oil, check a reliable reference before adding it to the mix.

The how

So, how do you make this? It is easy

1. Gather up all ingredients, including the essential oils
2. Place in a food processor
3. Pulse for 30 seconds
4. Scrape down sides
5. Pulse again for 30 seconds.

At this point, check it. It is very easy to overblend. To ensure this works correctly, keep blending to a minimum to preserve the grit of the sugar and salt. It should feel gritty like coarse sand. You may need to repeat steps 4 and 5 a couple more times.

Place this in a jar or other sealable container. Since brown sugar, honey, and salt are hygroscopic, they degrade by absorbing moisture from the air. You know what air in a bathroom has in it? Water! Keep it sealed to extend its shelf life.

Using it

When you want to use it, open the container, take out a teaspoonful, and use it as you would any other facial scrub. It is that simple.

A Side Note

If you are concerned about coconut oil, you could substitute an alternative oil, such as olive oil. In that case, we would recommend adding more arrowroot to the mix. Why is this needed? Coconut oil is firm enough at room temperature to retain its shape, whereas olive oil does not. Additional arrowroot or other thickener would be needed to solidify the mixture and prevent separation. We have not tried this ourselves but it would be a good experiment to try.

Wrapping Up

You know how to create your own facial scrub and tune it to your needs. While the ‘green goo’ isn’t the prettiest, it is highly effective and made with ingredients that are generally low-cost and have known health benefits. In addition, it is easy to make, smells good, and can make a decent homemade gift.

The post How To Make A Great Facial Scrub first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

But what if you don’t want a giant privacy wall in your yard? What if you want to keep the deer out while still enjoying your view? In the spirit of previous posts, we needed to learn to make something work rather than keep buying detternts.

How High Can Deer Jump?

Deer are surprisingly athletic, and most adult deer can easily jump a 6-foot fence. If they’re motivated (and the landing area is safe), some can clear heights up to 8 feet according to the NCWRC. Deer usually will not jump a 6-foot fence, but they can clear an 8-foot fence on level ground if properly motivated. Because of this ability, a 7- to 8-foot fence is generally recommended.

The problem?

Lumber is expensive, tall fences can block your view, and building something that high takes time, effort, and money. Also, once built, maintenance of wood fences, especially in wetter climates, is problematic.

A Simpler, Cheaper Solution: The Invisible Deer Fence

There’s an alternative that works beautifully for most gardens and smaller landscapes: an invisible deer fence made from 8-foot garden stakes and heavy-duty fishing line.

Here’s how it works:

• Use 8-foot garden stakes (metal or other high-strength types) spaced 8–10 feet apart around the perimeter of the area you want to protect.
• String 300-lb test clear fishing line around the stakes at two or three different heights — typically 2 feet, 4 feet, and 6 feet off the ground.
• Place the fence 2–3 feet away from the plants or garden beds the deer want to eat.

Because the fishing line is nearly invisible, the deer can’t see it. When they walk into it or try to push through, the line confuses them. They can feel the barrier but can’t understand what’s stopping them. That’s usually enough to deter them entirely.

Why It Works

Deer rely heavily on both sight and hearing for their depth perception and caution. Because their eyes are on the side of their head, their depth perception isn’t great. They don’t like entering areas where they can’t clearly see boundaries or escape routes. The invisible barrier triggers that natural wariness. After one or two attempts, most deer decide it’s not worth the effort and move on.

Benefits of a Fishing Line Deer Fence

• Inexpensive: Costs a fraction of traditional wood or wire fencing.
• Unobtrusive: Keeps your view open and your yard looking natural.
• Easy to maintain: If a line breaks, it’s quick to repair or replace.
• Versatile: Works well around trees, vegetable gardens, and ornamental beds.
• Greener: Fewer materials needed

The Drawbacks

We’re the first to say this type of fence is not perfect. This setup won’t necessarily keep deer off your entire property; it will only keep them out of the specific areas you fence in. For many homeowners, that’s actually a plus — deer can still roam through, but your favorite plants stay safe.

It is also not a barrier to those other pesky critters we love and hate: squirrels, rabbits, etc. This style of fence is designed to create a perimeter around areas such as raised beds, ornamental shrubs, and even trees.

This type of barrier works best when we have select blocks or strips of land to protect. For example, it isn’t going to stop a ravenous herd that has no other food source than your large-scale commercial orchard.

Wrapping Up

You don’t need to sacrifice your view or your budget to keep deer out of your garden. With a few garden stakes, strong fishing line, and some simple planning, you can create a nearly invisible barrier that protects your plants while keeping your landscape open and natural.

A deer fence doesn’t have to be a wall. Sometimes, the best defense is the one you can’t even see.

The post How To Make A Simple Deer Fence first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Setting Up our Goals

To begin with, we got honest about our goals, which was an outcome of reviewing our habits. After some conversations and ideating, we made a list of our 3 to 6-month goals with attainable outcomes. Achievable and actionable goals are key to driving real, attainable outcomes. These items went into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t easy because we had to be honest about trade-offs and priorities.

In that process, we found that there are things we think we want to do and things we will do. Many of us have things we say we want but will never achieve because we cannot take action or are unwilling to suffer for them. We may want to be rock stars or master gardeners, which takes time and energy. 

If we pursue those goals, we must trade off other things we want to expend energy on. By focusing on what we wish to in a measurable and actionable way, we make sure we focus our energy on things we won’t simply drop just because something got ‘hard’. Unfortunately, growth isn’t easy, but by focusing on actionable items, you can prove that you are progressing due to your effort.

Buckets of Hours for Balance

We assigned each goal a bucket of hours each week. Those buckets of hours allow us to stay balanced and manage multiple goals simultaneously. We are rarely engaged in one single goal at a time. There will usually be an attempt to attain various goals simultaneously. 

Even if you want to be an Olympic athlete, you will not be training every minute of the day. You will also need to build your brand, do interviews, and find a way to earn income later. The sport may be the primary focus, but it can’t always be the only thing you can focus on. 

Before the week starts, we put what we will work on on the sheet and tie those items to the larger goals. We then estimate each item to make sure it can make it happen. Further, we make sure the goals are attainable that week. We can’t plant a garden if the weather isn’t expected to cooperate. This work creates an actionable weekly plan with no foreseeable blocking dependencies.

Logging our Time

Every day, we ‘bill’ our time against the tasks we have for that week, just like any other project. We log this for every day we work on one of the tasks. To be realistic, we also bill our daily duties, such as making dinner, doing dishes, or even going to the gym. Let’s face it: those things also take time and limit our capacity for the bigger goals.

As the week goes on, we add notes about wins, losses, and learnings as things progress. These become items to review every Friday to gauge how the week went. Our time logging creates a data-based way of determining how things are proceeding. 

 If something happens and we can’t get through an item, we want to ensure it doesn’t keep recurring. If it happens repeatedly, it is feedback that it is not actionable or can’t be done right now due to some dependency.

Celebrate the Wins

We have learned that we must also celebrate our wins if something has gone well. If we have made a huge gain or overcome a hurdle, we want to recognize and reward ourselves; otherwise, working towards long-term goals can feel like an overwhelming slog. If you’re going to become a great baker, you want to make sure you recognize when you have made something great so you know how to repeat it. 

The point here is that we want to remove the stigma of failure. By documenting learnings, we see how we are growing, while celebrating wins, we see our progress. This helps us through positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement, which can lead to cognitive biases like Survivor’s Bias that block our growth.

This approach has made us feel more productive and focused. This isn’t a new concept per se. We do Scrum events in software engineering to help teams build their products. Initially, that is where the idea of our personal time card started, but it is not what it has become.

An Actionable Feedback Loop

Our timecard has become a constant feedback loop that helps us address the question, ‘Am I doing everything possible to achieve what I want and what is truly important to me?’ That question can be tricky to answer when we are the judge and jury looking at our performance. It always feels like more must be done, which isn’t always actionable or possible.

A timesheet that tracks progress toward our personal goals gives us a practical gut check and a way to examine our approach to goals and the trade-offs between them. We have real numbers to look at when we ask ourselves if I am doing enough about <x> or should focus more on <y> this week. It then becomes much more about data than about emotional context or mood.

What, No Example?

No, we are not going to give an example. Why? We don’t want to focus on the tools. You can take notes on a whiteboard, a Google calendar, an Excel spreadsheet, or even sticky notes. The point is that the tools don’t matter, but the process does. All you need to do to succeed is:

• Create a set of actionable goals you want to work towards.
• Create a bucket of hours for each.
• Log your time daily.
• Have a win, a learning, or a failure? Take a note!
• Review once a week to celebrate what got done and learn from what went wrong.

Wrapping Up

We know punching a clock can feel tedious. However, we have found this approach a huge help. While your mileage may vary, it has been beneficial for us in balancing our march toward multiple goals. It has helped us realize where we want to be and, more importantly, how to estimate our progress.

The post How To Be Successful Via A Time Card first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

You can easily quantify how much you weigh or how much money you make. Some goals that maximize your potential are not as easy as they seem to quantify. For example, ‘I want to be in good shape’, but putting a pin in for an outcome is hard. Because of those challenges, we decided to take a different approach to how we viewed success, blocks, and missteps via habits.

How This Idea Came About?

It was simple. We were looking for new hobbies during the winter when the weather wasn’t conducive to our regular sports and traveling. Being frugal and conscious of waste, we didn’t want to do things to keep busy. We had a few conversations back and forth about things we wanted to do, but we were worried about cost and space. 

In one of those conversations, we realized we didn’t want another hobby to do another ‘thing. ‘ There had to be more to it than simply entertaining ourselves. Those activities aren’t bad, but we have enough of them. It had to be something that created value in our lives. 

Value Add was Key

The idea of creating value stuck. Value was the key to unlocking a more philosophical approach to all our activities. As we refined this idea, we saw larger implications of that approach. Value was tangible even if it wasn’t easily quantifiable. As with any investment, we wanted to understand how we would be rewarded so we could rank our activities. If you spend time doing something, you want to be rewarded by it in return. The better the return, the larger the reward.

We decided to start ranking our activities by value. Did we get the same value out of watching a movie that we did out of going to the gym? What was the investment for each time? How did the outcomes of doing the activity benefit us? We started to realize that not all activities benefit us. Some activities we found valuable, but they were more maintenance than fun hobbies. 

Out of this, the three habits were born. So what are they?

The Three Habits of Us All

There are three habits all of us have. That is not a judgment because what you value and do is up to you. We only label them to help us define ourselves. The habits are:

• Creation: Habits that create something.
• Stability: Habits that maintain our current state.
• Waste: Habits that have negative sides to them.

Let’s get to defining them.

Habits of Creation

These things we do add value to our lives by creating new things for ourselves. If you garden and grow vegetables to eat, then gardening is a habit of creation for you. You will usually gain something from sitting on the couch and reading a book. That makes reading a habit of creation for you. You practice a creation habit whenever you seek an opportunity to advance a goal. 

Habits of Stability

We must follow these habits, but may not enjoy them or create something new. For example, cleaning the house every week is necessary, but may not add additional value to your life. Another example may be going grocery shopping, which is required to eat. Essentially, any time you perform maintenance or routine tasks necessary to support your life, you practice a habit of stability. 

Habits of Waste

Habits of waste are things we do that create waste. When you go out to eat, only eat half and throw the rest away; you waste food and money. If you have a gym membership, go three times a week, and never push yourself, you get nothing for your time and money. That is what we would call creating waste. Sounds a bit preachy, right?

We’re not Preaching! It is—not—about preaching. It is about honestly identifying areas where we waste our time. Why? Because those areas don’t add value, they still cost us and keep us from doing things we value more. They are, however, sometimes necessary as a tradeoff.

Let’s examine when they are necessary.

You may need to eat out if you are busy working all week, spend your entire Saturday doing yard work, or take the kids to soccer practice. It may be that the only option to eat out is somewhere that serves a larger portion size than you want. Could you have made dinner? Sure! But in this case, you are spending so much of your time with habits of creation that you need to balance them with some waste to stay productive and possibly sane. 

That’s How We Use Them

We use these to review a week or even a year to gauge how things are going. Did we spend more time in habits that created waste, or did we spend more time in habits of creation? Are we balancing the three? When we plan a week and look at the tasks ahead of us, what is the ratio of each outcome of our actions? 

TL;DR: Are we making headway, staying stable, or stuck in a destructive pattern? 

This also applies to longer-term goals. Not all goals are quantifiable or quickly reachable, and life is not linear. Just because we want to do something doesn’t mean something won’t block our path. Things like health, family, and economics are external forces that can hinder our short-term progress. We don’t always control those events but can control how we react. 

The Negative Cycle That These Avoid

The biggest challenge for many of us is recognizing progress. Learning and growing can be frustrating and even painful processes. Many times, to succeed, you must know by failure. When focused on the short term, those failures can lead us to feelings of negativity. We are wired for negativity, and that wiring protects us in the short term. To succeed and grow, we need mechanisms to rewire us to see opportunities. Canonizing these three habits can help us with that rewiring. 

When we try and fail, it is easy for us to assume we learned nothing. Worse yet, there are times in life when we can lose track of our gains due to the duration or challenges of our goals. I will never be an Iron Chef; however, I did learn to cook and do meal planning. It was not a linear progression of learning. There were times I filled the house with acrid smoke, and we ended up going out for fast food.

I was, and always will, be learning. That failure and the lessons learned from it could have been wasteful. In these cases, my ‘Habit of Creation’ is to note what went wrong, why, and how to avoid it the next time. In that act, we take something that was a waste and make it something that creates learning. 

Progress Indicators

Because life and learning aren’t linear, it isn’t always easy to know if we are succeeding in our goals. When we review progress on our goals, we look at what is trending. Seeing more of the week or month with more Creation than Waste indicates that we are progressing, even if we have another year or more to accomplish our goals. This is what some would call ‘working a plan’. 

If life forces a pause due to financial, medical, or other external forces, we may see an uptick in our Stability over Creation. That is still a positive outcome over waste. Sometimes, we might have to wait and see what little we can do alone. For example, economic downturns are not something you, as an individual, can do anything about. What is important is that you can keep a positive mental picture by being able to see what you are doing to stabilize yourself and reduce waste.

Our Check In

We keep a log occasionally, especially when unsure of our progress. Every week, we take 15 minutes to write out 2-3 of each habit we have acted on. For example, we might have done research that turned into a blog post. Out of that research came learning. Maybe we planted a garden but underestimated the time needed to do that activity, so we ate out. Out of that, maybe there was a mix of waste and creation. 

Over time, we want to see a more create-than-waste trend. If we know no stability, we probably let some things go that we shouldn’t. While we don’t love doing maintenance work, sometimes we must stop and change our lawn mower’s oil. Maintenance doesn’t stop there. It may also mean doing a portfolio tune-up to ensure your financial goals are met. Stability comes in many shapes and sizes. 

Wrapping Up

We discussed three types of habits to help guide our definition of progress. By canonizing tasks into Habits of Creation, Stability, and Waste, we can help measure our progress. We can use these as a reality check when we feel we aren’t making progress or learning. It is easy to get discouraged without feedback on successes. These tools can help us define success and overcome that problem to stay focused and positive, or make changes so that we can be.

The post How To Build A Road To Better Habits first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

The Numbers

Based on EPA data, 66 million tons of consumable food were wasted in the US in 2019, a staggering 133 billion pounds of food. Those numbers say we waste roughly 30-40% of the US food supply, and 60% of the wasted food goes into landfills. The amount of land wasted growing and getting rid of that food due to loss is roughly the size of California and New York combined. 

Further, a 2010 USDA study put a price tag on that loss of $162 billion in food. The average US consumer creates 218.9 lbs of food waste to another EPA source for 2010. That statement is not about being preachy but about recognising that we all have an impact on the larger picture.

At that level of food waste, we get large-scale wastes of other resources such as energy. The whole supply chain from creation to clean-up of that wasted food uses enough energy to power 50 million US homes, about the same carbon footprint as 42 coal-fired electrical plants. In addition to the energy impact, decaying food waste produces byproducts such as methane gas. The combined total of greenhouse gasses that wasted food creates is 8-10% of our total greenhouse gasses. 

Why Do You Care?

You are paying for it with your cash. This problem impacts your budget. How? The most obvious answer is that if you spend money on something you don’t use and have to throw away, you threw money away. Let’s add a bit more to that. Think about an average family of four who wastes 219 lbs of food per person per year. Based on those statistics, the math says a family of four throws away 876 lbs of things they paid for but didn’t consume. 

To have a tasty beverage or meal, food needs to arrive at your home or favorite eatery and find a new home when you get rid of it. The supply chain responsible for making that happen is where the real impact and cost of wasting food are hidden. Remember, for food to arrive, it has to be picked, shipped, made, etc. To make that happen, you need fuel to truck food to processing plants, which use energy to make your favorite ice cream, deli meat, cheese, etc. 

All those processes consume resources, some of which, like roads, most of us pay taxes to upkeep. They also produce pollutants that harm the air and water. As you would imagine, when we throw food away, we get similar problems. 60% of all wasted food goes to a landfill in garbage trucks. Those sites and the people that run them come out of your taxes and even increase the cost of goods and services for the foods you throw away.

The Bigger Picture

As a consumer at the end of a supply line, you are the apex consumer of the entire process of farm to market. This supply chain isn’t local; it’s global. For example, we know pineapples and bananas are not grown in the US in most states. If you have a fresh strawberry-pineapple smoothie in the middle of winter in Chicago, even the strawberries aren’t from a local market. This means you are paying a premium for products out of season to be shipped to you, which raises costs.

What also isn’t apparent is that to make displays and have enough food on hand, a store or restaurant will have waste. Why? Not every strawberry or pound of ground beef will be sold before it goes bad. There isn’t a perfect system to match all food with all consumers. Unlike other products, food can’t just sit on the shelf forever like a pair of pants. This is the primary reason you will see discounted prices for food close to their sell-by date.

Premium or Loss Leader?

For example, ham can be a seasonal premium product or a loss leader. Since it is in high demand before a holiday, it may be sold at a premium. Retailers will take on extra stock so they don’t run out. Wait one week after, and it will be on sale to draw shoppers in. What isn’t sold will eventually find its way to local landfills. Your taxes pay for those landfills, so whether you buy the ham or not, you will pay for it in some small way to be in your local grocery store.

As a consumer of this global system, you pay a premium for these products due to shipping. The cost is built into the operating cost of every step of the supply chain. That is part of why prices change seasonally for specific items. That global impact is all part of what we throw away when we throw away some mushy bananas or don’t finish our pineapple and guava smoothie. 

Awareness Over Stumping for Change

Food waste doesn’t help anyone. We wanted to put some numbers behind it to show that even at a basic level. The reasons we don’t want to soapbox about this are numerous but revolve around these ideas:

• We don’t want to advocate putting people out of jobs by not eating out.
• Not everyone has time to use everything from snout to tail.
• Food is about being social and providing entertainment. 
• Not everyone lives on land they can do things like compost on.
• Not everyone has the time or space to reduce their food waste footprint.

With awareness, you can help and create a positive impact. The impact you can have isn’t strictly as simple as saving money. Money savings are the most tangible issue to address. The reality is that there is more that you are helping with, like reducing landfills, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and many more less concrete things. 

Some Quick Wins

If you want to reduce waste, here are some ideas. These can help your financial bottom line and the rest of us. 

• Have a leftover mindset. Whether you are cooking at home or eating out, have a plan for using leftovers. 
• Be a seasonal eater. Buying foods in season reduces the amount of non-local food, such as imported strawberries, consumed in the off-season.
• Be aware that use-by and best-buy are guidelines, not rules, so you don’t need to throw out some items you may think you do. 
• Patronize restaurants that serve portions that match your calorie budget and needs. 
• Create a meal plan so that you know just how much you need and no more.  

Wrapping Up

 In this post, we have shown how big a problem food waste is. It impacts everything from money to employment to natural resources. With a bit of awareness, it doesn’t take much to influence how you address you in this area. Little changes can help save you money while creating a positive impact on a global scale. 

The post Food Waste Costs All Of Us Big Money first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Spoilers and TL;DR;

This post is longer than we like. Why? Because to understand an economy such as convenience, you have to set some context. If you are looking for the takeaway and how to save on costs, skip down to Our Learnings. If you want to understand how we unpack on this topic, read on. 

Opposing Forces

There’s a saying, “You can have it quick, cheap or done right. Pick any two”. Why do folks say that? Because it is true! Those are three opposing forces all of us consumers face. By consumers I mean any person or thing doing trading goods and services with another person or thing. That is what an economy is; barter of time and materials with another person or business. 

The balance of these three forces is how we determine personal value. If you break your leg, done right and quick, will take precedence over cheap. You will go to the ER, get pain medication, have the leg set correctly, and you are willing to pay a premium for it. Because you are willing to pay almost anything to stop the pain and fix the leg, it is a perfect example of an inelastic demand curve.

In another example, your vehicle may need an oil change. That is not extremely hard to do, but it is time consuming if you include buying parts and getting rid of the waste oil. In this case, it may be cheaper than going to the dealer, and you can do this as well as a technician. Still, there is a tradeoff of your time to do the work. 

Where It Becomes Gray

Let’s face it, sometimes, you just get hungry and want a burger. You absolutely must have one before you become hangry. That makes your overriding priority. Still, you have a choice to make; cheap or right. Ok, that is admittedly, a strange thought. What is ‘right’ when it comes to a burger? Does it need to be wagyu beef on a toasted brioche bun with micro-greens and bacon jam? Or can it be something out of a gas station hot case?

Let’s go back to our oil change example. We can go out, buy factory parts, tools, and spend our time changing our oil. We will need to run the errands of getting those items first, then do the work, then do the clean up. Finally, we take the used oil and hopefully recycle it. That is a lot of trouble, time, and money for one oil change. If we have our vehicle for 5 years, and have only invested in tools once, buy supplies once, in bulk, then it might be more viable. 

Ah, but yes, other places can change the oil in your vehicle as well. They use dealer grade parts and have lower labor rates. But if we chose that option, will it be done right? That depends on how you define being right. Do they save more time? That depends on your schedule and how urgent you need that oil changed. 

The Chains 

First, let’s eliminate the idea of bartering from our conversation. That is a complete economy of its own that needs its post. For our purposes, when we purchase something, we will use money. The work and/or goods we produce determine our income and money. When we pay someone, that is for them, or more importantly, the chain of people and value they add to the thing we are buying. 

Chain of value-adding people is key to the high cost of buying items of convenience. Durable goods such as cars and washing machines are good examples of value adding chains. The goods we buy are sourced from all over the world. At each step, each piece adds cost to the final product. For example, if someone produces the tires for a vehicle, they need to be paid, as do their sources. Every step, every part, has to be made and shipped and assembled. That’s a lot of folks with hands out. 

 Now, let’s pick one that is not so obvious. What about a McDonald’s Big Mac? No, we aren’t picking on them exclusively, but they are so ubiquitous they are relatable for most people. When we buy a Big Mac, we are paying multiple premiums on that food. There is a large chain of people involved in making sure you get your tasty Big Mac promptly. Those toasted sesame seeds on that bun didn’t toast themselves. 

The Obvious

 Every time we make a purchase decision, we are deciding what amount of right and how quickly we are willing to pay for it. We all make those decisions every day. In general, we probably don’t think about them. Many of us don’t think along these lines actively, but we all do process the data we are given as a set of trade-offs. 

When we are in the store, we may choose a high-end brand name product or a less expensive generic. In each case we are actually making a choice of what ‘done right’  is from a product pov. We place a monetary value on that choice.  The monetary decision is based on how much we value something versus how much the rest of society is willing to pay for something. 

Enter Convenience

We are often willing to pay a premium for a quicker reward. The same goes for buying time back. If you are working 45 hours a week, have a couple kids, and hobbies, time is a precious commodity. Time is finite and the demand curve we have for it can be very inelastic. Doing some research yields that an average person splits between 80-90% of their time between work, household work, and human needs, that doesn’t leave a lot of free time.  

A callout on that data. That sample feels skewed but as with all things health related, it is a best guess based on a series of polls. The group sampled was between ages 15 and 64 and may or may not be employed. There is enough common knowledge around sleep, and work life balance, to contradict some of this. That being said, the trade, in many cases, would be an increase in work and commuting at a loss of sleep instead of additional free time, which would lead to the same problem of limited time.

With so little time, many are willing to pay for services that can’t perform or simply don’t have time for. Don’t have time for dinner? Order out! Don’t have time to clean? Hire a cleaning service! Want a date night alone for two? Hire a nanny! But what are the actual trade offs?

Time vs Money Pitfalls 

When we pay money for goods, many times, we are expecting to get time back. That doesn’t always happen. Why? Consider this:

• Our money supply is generated through us spending time earning. 
• Because society considers some skills more valuable than others, we earn different amounts based on our work.
• When we purchase an item, it usually comes with a chain of value adders that drive up its price, making it a premium product relative to what we may be able to do on our own.

Why do these items matter? Because your money is directly tied to your time. That is what money is exchanged for. You have knowledge, goods, or other items you have invested your time in. Sometimes the trade offs work, and sometimes they don’t.

Examples In Numbers

Let’s do some math. Doug makes $40 an hour. Doug has two kids and a domestic partner. We will say if Doug chooses, he can make dinner for 4 in 45 minutes with $15 of ingredients.  The other choice is that Doug picks up food on his way home, which costs him 15 minutes of time and $10 per person plus a $5 tip. 

The cost of each meal is not only in the dollar cost but the time cost. Doug values his time at $40 an hour.  That means if Doug spends 45 minutes making dinner, his time value is equivalent to $30. When you add $15 of ingredients to that cost, you get the meal for 4 being $45 of his time. 

Conversely, if Doug opts to pick up food, it is more expensive. Fifteen minutes is equivalent to $10. That means the meal cost him $55 of his time.  In this case, what looks like a time buy back costs someone more than they value their time at.

Now we look at Ann. Ann has a similar domestic arrangement. She makes $80, which is double the value of time when compared to Doug. That makes the meal made at home worth $75 worth of her time. The meal out would equate to $65 worth of her time. In Ann’s case, she is buying back her time, but really, only $10 worth. If she were to make enough for leftovers, it might still be worth her time to make the meal at home.  

Our Learnings

As we started to re-evaluate many things in our life, we built out a calorie budget. The first outcome from that was we had to stop eating out. We had used restaurants for convenience, thinking they were saving time.  At our cabin, we had to start cooking more as well. We decided to use some discount grocers as they were a one-stop shop in those less urban areas. At the same time, we were tracking our budget looking for what we need for retirement. A funny serendipitous thing happened.

Both the amount we were spending on going out and our groceries went down significantly. By being calorie conscious, we cut our eating out, which led to eating in. Looking at future retirement needs made us look at being more price conscious. This led to a further reduction in cost. Interestingly enough, we didn’t lose time waiting in lines or for someone to prepare a meal for us. Finally, it made us look at other areas where we were paying for convenience. 

Tips And Traps

Finally, we come to some tips and traps from our learnings. Hopefully they will be food for thought for others.

Tips:

• In terms of ‘Done Right’, premium products may not be worth it. Most products have generic or house brands that are just as good or close enough.
• Before making a purchase choice, think about your time and what it is worth. If something is going to be 8 hours of your time, you are saying it is worth a day working to have it.
• By planning, you can cut down the need for urgency, which usually comes with a trade-off of a higher price.
• Look around your home and ask yourself if every product is needed. Many home products are easy to make with items we have on hand, are just as effective as store-bought.
• Block out time to make a menu or craft items on your calendar so you can stay ahead of needs
• Be intentional in how you spend money, meaning know what your time is truly worth. 

Traps:

• What we perceive as time saving may not be when weighed against other trade-offs once we think about the total cost of that item.. 
• Commit to doing things more than once if they require an investment in tools and supplies.  If you don’t, those tools and supplies will make the initial time you do something more expensive than it is probably worth. 
• Not defining ‘good enough’ before we start a project or even eating out can lead us to overspending. 
• Prioritizing ‘Cheap’ for items when we should prioritize ‘Done Right’ can cause us to re-spend the same time and money over and over. 

One Last Musing

One outcome for us from our learnings was in how we approached a more intentional form of spending our time and money. We came to look at some items as challenges to be solved through hobbies. For us, we decided to make things like making hot sauce, beer, sausage, and jerky part of our things that were fun to do. When we do this, the time cost is reduced for both the hobby and what it produces. For example, if you fish, and you eat fish, while not a convenient thing to do, you help fund your meals while enriching your life via those hobbies. 

Wrapping Up

If you are still with us, we thank you for your patience. This is not a simple topic. The takeaway is there is a cost for convenience. There are times that cost makes sense and there are times it does not. By learning to value your time, and understand what is ‘good enough’, you can better address your budgeting. Further, if you can use your hobbies as a way to cut down the need for convenience items, you can reduce your overall spend of both time and money.

The post The True Cost Of The Easy Way first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

There’s No Accounting for Taste

Before we start, let’s recognize and acknowledge ‘There’s no accounting for taste’. It has been a mission of ours for over a year to understand how to be frugal with food without compromising quality. Taste, and quality, are different for different folks. That being said, we have found what works for us and a level of quality of food that we are comfortable with. To produce it, in general, we don’t rely on premium products with a few exceptions. 

Definitions

We will start by giving some definitions for context. These are our definitions and how we approach the tradeoffs we see between money, time, and waste. Waste is an important concept in economies. We will touch on that after we give some definitions.

• The Economics of Scale are places where you can lower costs by buying more. We often see this in membership warehouse stores such as Costco or large-scale retailers such as Walmart. In their cases the volume of buying power allows them to negotiate lower prices.
• The Economics of Time ( also considered Convenience) is how much time a person invests to use, make, or do something. These are usually things like trade-offs between making food and eating out where we weigh the amount of our time to something against the purchase cost.
• The Economics of Zero Waste (or simply Waste) comes from the idea of zero-waste living. For economies of scale and time to be optimized we want to limit waste. If we don’t limit waste, we are losing money and time for items that add no value which negatively impacts economies of scale and time. 

Do You Care?

Maybe? Maybe Not? We found these three concepts are a guiding rubric for balancing budget and life. They lead to feeling better about how we spend our time and money by providing a logical way to gauge purchases. There are times when we have more money than time and vice versa. Everyone has their value systems, and they change over time as our lives change. 

By being conscious of what is important to you, you can save time, money, and waste so they are good to know. That may sound obvious but know it is easy to lose track of goals and focus when life is busy. We will look next at how these three themes affect our personal home economics. 

The Big Three

Scale 

If you choose to make more food at home, you can leverage the economics of scale to your advantage. Many people may know this coming from large families but in general the more you buy, the cheaper the price. In essence, you are mimicking the same idea of purchasing power as any large retailer would but on a personal level.

We are all used to seeing sales where we get 3 steaks for the price of 2 or buy one get one for a dollar more. That is simply marketing to average out a value that entices us to buy more than we usually would. Due to that, you may choose to cook steaks over pork chops that night. Getting a deal is great but buying cooking staples in bulk usually is not the same concept. You may choose to buy 

You can spend less money by weight for items like oil, flour, spices, etc. as you increase the quantity of your purchase. Those are the economies of scale we are discussing.  As the weight increases from say a quart to a gallon, your price will go down per oz.  In many cases, the prices will go down even more. Spices also follow this model. I have paid the same or more for 1.5 ozs of the same spice in a jar as I have for a 14 oz large plastic restaurant container. 

Time and Convenience 

Time, and its partner, convenience is also a critical cost measurement. As in any economy, we are trading specialization and using money as a common way to value our time. The more money we make, the more time we can free up through purchasing time through convenience. This is exactly what happens when we order food regularly. Sometimes makes perfect sense to order out to save some time or as a treat. Ordering out isn’t the only time and convenience vs money trade-off. 

Some recipes are multi-step, and labor-intensive food to produce like lasagna. It is here that we need to start thinking about our time and the outcome of it on a per portion time cost. We can buy a lasagna we like, that is about 85% as good as homemade, and that saves us 2 hours in a kitchen, for about the same cost as homemade for 10 portions. That is not the same as when we make a soup or bread in which we get better quality for 30-60 minutes of active involvement. 

That being said, we struggle when it comes to going out for a sandwich, hamburger, or tacos. Making them at home gives us the ability to control our portions, use items on hand, and have roughly the same outcome as dining out quality-wise. Further, we can make them cheaper and in roughly the same amount of time, we would take to eat out.

Waste

Waste is where the idea of saving time and money can become casualties. The idea behind economies of zero waste is to reuse, re-purpose, and not throw out anything salvageable. In terms of food, this means when eating out or in. Where this resonates with us is the idea of not wasting just food but time and money. 

When you choose to go out, you are paying a premium in money for your food as it has been created through others’ work. You are usually paying a premium time-wise for those portions. For events, celebrations, etc. that may be the intent. If you then have leftovers and don’t take them home, you are creating additional waste which doubles the effective cost in time and money.

This also occurs in home cooking. If you buy ingredients that are one-off or go bad before you can use them you are creating waste. It means you spent a premium for one meal. Why? If you buy say, fish sauce for $10, use two tablespoons, then let it go bad after a lack of use, you spent $10 on a single part of a single meal. 

Putting It Together 

Let’s try and talk through how this works in practice from what we did. We decided to cook at home more than eat out to control our calorie budget. This initially meant spending more time and was less convenient than eating out. In essence, at first, we lost time however, we immediately saw a decrease in monetary cost and waste. 

We then found portion control to be problematic and stored too much food. This created a different set of wastes for us through freezer burn. The lack of variety also made us stumble and go back to eating out more again which was more wasted time not only in going out but time sunk into making things we didn’t eat. 

Where we landed was understanding, for us, what we did well at home. For example, we will go out for Thai or Chinese as we don’t want to store what are one-off items and ingredients. Further, because we specialize in certain areas, we know what we can buy in bulk.  This has led to optimizing through getting good at a wide variety of things we can produce quickly. It has also kept the cost down as we buy things such as flour, cheese, butter, etc. in quantities that allow us to buy cheaper.

We Aren’t Anti-Local

There is a perception that large retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, etc. destroy local community stores. There are tradeoffs to having them for sure. Our point in this post is not to guide you to them instead of other options. It is the opposite. We use both types of retailers as needed and use them for what they each excel at. 

We see each as a specialist in an area. I see no reason to spend a premium on bulk canola oil at a local grocery store. It’s cooking oil, nothing more and nothing less. Conversely, for example, in our small-town Walmart, there aren’t any specialty meats or local flavors. In those cases, we are always willing to pay the premium to a local business. It’s your conscience and value system so you should do you. That is an economy that deals in personal beliefs we don’t dare touch it.

Wrapping Up

We have discussed several economies and rubrics around their use. By learning what is important for you, you can reduce costs in both time and money while reducing waste. This is only an initial post on this subject. We will tie this into how having chosen to keep items on hand and investing in learning opens more options for cost reductions. 

The post How To Make Your Home Economy Work first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

With winter and holidays, many of us find ourselves eating above our calorie budgets. That is easy to do considering what fall and the holiday cycles bring. We find ourselves tempted by the treats, and for most a bit more sedentary due to the weather changes and decreased sunlight. Instead of denying this or worrying about it and feeling bad when we go over it, let’s embrace it for growth.

Grow, cut, maintain, then do it again. That is a very oversimplified way to think about how bodybuilding works. Yes, there are a lot of nuances and other parts to body building but let’s use this over trivialization to simplify our holiday eating dilemma. Let’s use this type of formula to talk about a yearly cycle as if we were going to train for a yearly competition. 

Most of us want to maintain some sort of mobility and physical capability. For many, it starts with a New Year’s resolution. Other people may have a life-changing event or news that challenges them to do something. That was my case. In any of these cases, the catalyst and starting point are usually random. 

Because the starting point in the year can be so random, we can end up fighting things that we don’t need to. Let’s be honest, cutting weight during holidays is harder than when we have a more fixed diet. You can do it, but it will be harder. What if your goal was to grow in size? That seems like it would be a no-brainer to do in the fall. If you are trying to gain, the longer and more active days of summer create other barriers. 

A Year At A Glance

Let’s try and bring some order to the year to stop making it so hard. What if we looked at the year as if we were training for a competition? We will use the idiom ‘Sun’s out, guns out’ as our goal where the beginning of summer is our ‘competition’ we are training to be in shape for. This is how we define our year:

• October to February: Use the additional treats and food to build lean muscle.
• March to May: Work on the definition of body structure by cutting unneeded fat. 
• June to September: Maintain target weight while working to increase mobility

In the sequence above we are working with the seasons to make our goals easier.  Whether you are gaining weight or losing it, each season can help you in your goal. We would assert that this is what most of us want to accomplish. We want the strength and mobility of increased muscle while limiting the unneeded fat which is not considered healthy. 

It’s Your Routine Not Ours

There is no way we can write a routine for this. Why? It’s your body and your goals. This is a roadmap for us to think about our goals and easier ways to attain them. For example, we can give an idea of why this helps with an imaginary routine set to those periods.

• October to February:
  • Increase time under tension and progressive overload to grow lean muscle.
  • Expect to gain 2-3% of body weight as a mix of lean muscle and some additional fat.
  • Use additional sedentary periods as recovery cycles to push muscles to grow.
• March to May:
  • Lower working weight and increase reps as well as tempo to increase calorie burning.
  • Manage a diet closer to the calorie budget for weight loss to reduce unneeded fat to achieve the body weight you desire.
  • Use improving weather to increase activity levels outdoors.
• June to September:
  • Focus exercise on full range of motion and optimizing for proper form.
  • Monitor weight to verify it is not spiking high or low and adjust the calorie budget as needed.
  • Work to improve symmetry over producing more lean muscle to recover for the next year. 

But I Don’t Want To Get Swole Bro! 

This is what we hear commonly from many people as soon as we say anything about gaining lean muscle and increasing weight. It seems counter-intuitive but we are not talking about bodybuilding to gain size per se. Bodybuilding uses these phases very efficiently to train for a competition. We can use that format but for a different purpose.

You can choose the intensity of your workouts to create the muscle structure you want. We don’t feel most would argue that increased lean muscle helps us. That being said, I don’t want 23” biceps so my muscle goals are not about bulk. I want to be able to lift a bag of concrete and carry paint cans up a ladder and not feel worn out the next day. That can be achieved by simply having more lean muscle over fat. At the end of the day, you do you is what this is about.

Back to the Cycle

Our point is that if you are in a seasonal cycle like many of us, why not simply adjust your goals to take advantage of it? Trying to exchange fat for lean muscle through body recomposition is not realistic for many of us. You will find sources that say you can but the devil is always in the details nutrition and exercise-wise. It takes a great deal of dedication to make body re-composition happen.

We know bodybuilders increase their lean muscle over time through a cycle of building and cutting.  Also, we know that we can’t always be building as we need recovery to maintain our healthy bodies and mobility. If you are going to gain muscle you will probably increase your overall fat which means you will likely want to cut size at some point.

We feel having a yearly goal that is seasonal helps structure the cycles of gain and loss. Every season brings different benefits and challenges. We can use them to our advantage to optimize for our goals if we are aware of them and can align to their benefits. While it is a bit of planning in advance, we feel it can help you avoid the opposite problem which is seasonal failure and giving up during certain parts of the year.  

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed how to take advantage of seasonal changes to optimize your body goals. We talked about how you can approximate a bodybuilder’s build and cut cycle to increase your lean mass and reduce unwanted fat. By doing this you can optimize your workouts while handling seasonal changes gracefully. 

Also, just because it is similar to bodybuilding doesn’t mean you have to ‘get swole’ as some call it. Lean muscle and what your ‘guns’ look like are personal choices. But, by taking a yearly seasonal approach, you can be ready for the time when ‘Suns out, guns out’ comes around. 

The post How To Make Fitness Seasonal first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Background

We had learned to cook for ourselves and over time we began to like our food better than the restaurants. It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy a great taco or fried chicken, but rather, it was no longer an event. Eating out became a thing we needed when we traveled or needed a break from our home kitchen. 

This shift also caused us to rethink some of our social activities. We would often go out with friends rather than stay in. This happened a lot if we gathered at our recreational property. Part of our traditions was to go to a restaurant in town rather than cook. We had seen it as a time saver and fun. Our calorie budget and financial choices changed that for us.

Also, note that this post will introduce many concepts. We will provide more in-depth explanations in later posts. 

The Why of the Budget

We wanted a way to justify eating in or out in a simple way. Whether eating out or in, you have so many ways you can spend money. When eating out you can choose a fine dining venue or the local gas station hot case. When eating in you can choose to cook a high-end brand name or a more generic product. Unfortunately, these are both qualifiers and value judgments. We wanted something more concrete as a value quantifier to take the emotion out of our decisions. 

The What of the Budget

Money may be the root of all evil but it is also a simple quantifier. Time, which waits for no person, is also a simple quantifier. Very few people have unlimited money and nobody has unlimited time. We decided to use these two as our guiding principles when making food choices. These two constrained the overall choices we could make to something logical over emotional.

We decided we needed to factor in the total number of portions. Why factor it in? Because the number of portions is directly related to the investment of time and money in cooking. Many dishes make multiple portions however, some like lasagna come at a high time cost. We will discuss that later on in this article.

The How of the Budget

We tracked both our spending on eating out and eating in via our bank accounts. Many banks have budget tracking as part of their offering so this was simple. Each month, we looked at our accounts and saw what we had spent. We did build in some padding around alcohol since our bank’s tracking didn’t differentiate between groceries and alcohol. Overall we were able to start to understand what we were spending per portion. 

Portion size was critical in understanding both our food and eating out. If you eat at a casual dining restaurant like fast food, you get one portion of something like a Whopper or Big Mac. A meal at dinner or family-style restaurant can contain 2-3 portions. When you bring home leftovers the money you spent is now for two or more meals, not one.

Let’s compare with some numbers. You can go to a restaurant and spend $15 for a single portion of a meal in which you eat the whole entre. Alternatively, you can go to a restaurant and spend $22 for a large or family-style meal that you take home the extra portion. The meal costing $22 is going to cost you less per portion due to the extra portion you had left over.

We also gathered our empirical evidence of time. When we cooked we decided to occasionally time ourselves to see how long it took. We did the same estimation of eating out from getting in the car to finishing the meal. It isn’t obvious until you really think about it. When you go out, you may get in your car, drive 10 minutes, spend 10 minutes waiting in line to order and get your food, and then drive 10 minutes home, which is 30 minutes of your time spent.

The Budget as a Rubric

We are going to be honest here. This is a guide, not perfection. Figuring out all the nuances of cooking at home versus eating out strictly by numbers is never going to be perfect. There are way too many variables. When you cook at home, you have energy costs. The same occurs when you drive to a restaurant. Your cookware costs money that is amortized over time. When you eat out, there is no energy used to wash the dishes but there can be costs associated with wasted food. Due to all that, we think of this as a rubric rather than a hard and fast formula to prove one is better than the other. 

The Budget

We came up with a couple of guidelines for ourselves. To keep it simple, we limited how much nuance went into each. We broke it down into eating in vs. out. The numbers are based on our lifestyle and financial values. This simple guide can be adapted to your needs just as simply.

Eating In

• A maximum cost of $5 per person per meal that includes the appropriate portion sizes needed for our DRI. That includes everything from protein to carbohydrates 
• A maximum active time investment, including clean up of 1.5  hours per meal per day. 

Eating Out

• A maximum cost of $10 per person per meal portion including gratuity.
• A maximum time investment of 45 minutes from the point we get in the car to the point we are home. 

Hold Up, There’s a Change Up

Yes, we did change the language a bit. The word meal snuck in there as did the word active. The reason is eating out vs in is two different things and isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. When we eat out we are generally served a meal. When we eat we are building a meal out of building blocks described by MyPlate. At the end of the day, both are about portion sizes but we switched the language to call out the differences. 

We also used the word active. Many recipes have times when you have to do nothing. If you make bread, it may take 24 hours to fully rise. Your active time, which doesn’t include cleanup, may only be 25 minutes. That is the time you spend actively engaged in making the bread from mixing to mixing to kneading. 

We will keep this post brief by addressing both those concepts in depth in later posts. If we don’t take that approach this post becomes too barque to be of value.  

How It Shakes Out

When we eat, no matter how many dinners we have, we want to spend only 1.5 hours per day actively preparing food. We also want to keep meals to a fixed budget per portion. This means a couple of things. 

• We can prepare food on other days as 1.5 hours a day yields 10.5 hours a week for preparing food. There is no reason we can’t spend 30 minutes making biscuits two days before we use them.
• It is easy to trade off the complexity of a meal by making one item easy to balance out with more active cooking of other portions. A side of coleslaw that takes 5 minutes to make and can easily offset the complexity of frying fish and the clean-up after it.
• You can easily scale up portions to feed more people. In this model, we may pay for more ingredients but economies of scale work for us if we are cooking from scratch. We will talk about this in another post.
• Additional portions can be used later to offset time and money costs for a later meal.

This leaves eating out to be focused on more time management than strictly food costs. By limiting the amount of time we are willing to use for eating out, we gain back time for cooking. Why? Because our criteria are strict enough to force us to eat on a low-time budget. In many cases, we will simply combine a stop-to-eat with other errands when we are already out. 

The Curious Case Of Lasagna

We learned some of these rules the hard way. Lasagna was where we realized time and cost were the most important factors. Let’s explore this tale of woe. 

Lasagna seems simple and it is. Lasganas is cheese, sauce, noodles, and in our case meat. It makes many portions and is essentially a one-pot meal. It contains protein, carbs, fats, and vegetables. Ok, tomatoes are technically fruits but we aren’t going there and we will consider them vegetables. You can pre-make it and cook it when friends are over so you have time to chat. What an amazing dish! What a terrible time and money suck!

It was after making two dishes for friends that we started to realize this. As we began to bring our change of habits into our social circle we did some experiments. It turns out I can make twelve pork chops in gravy with biscuits and a side of corn in the time it takes me just to make a meat sauce for lasagna. I can also make them cheaper than the lasagna. Why?

Read The Fine Print

Making a lasagna is a multi-step process with multiple ingredients. You have to buy many ingredients which drives the per portion cost up. At a minimum, you will need 3 types of cheese, meat, vegetables, noodles, eggs, and sauce. Many of these ingredients are higher-cost ingredients because they are value-added products like sausage and cheese. 

Lasagna isn’t time-friendly either. You make a sauce or augment a store-bought one with meat and spices. Then, you have to make a cheese mixture. Depending on how you do yours, you have to boil noodles. On top of this, you have to assemble everything. After that, you have to bake it in two different steps. It has to then cool. The clean up after all of this is arduous as each step produces dirty dishes and don’t get me started on the baking dish clean up.

Pork chops were a quick sear in a pan and inexpensive proteins. Frozen corn is ubiquitous. Gravy is broth, spices, fat, and a thickener and when done, the pork chops simmer in them. Biscuits take 20 minutes if you are experienced in making them and come from cheap ingredients. The clean-up time for all of the above is less than 20 minutes. Tl;dr: it’s all about active time and cost and you have to read the recipe closely to understand where the true costs are. 

Wrapping Up

We have discussed several different concepts here. At the core is the idea of the time and money cost of what we eat. These are rubrics we came up with to guide us. We will eat out at a more expensive restaurant again sometime and we will probably make another lasagna. These guidelines help us frame our decision points to make better choices in how we spend our money and time.

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