So, in my ongoing quest to improve the new budget and live better on what we have now, and my growing fear that Trump is going to throw us back into 2009 or worse when all the jobs vanished, I have been working on one of the biggest expenses that IS mutable, unlike the mortgage, internet, etc.  And that is...food.  Most advice seems to always stem around don't eat out, cook yourself, but groceries are stupidly expensive, and the whole process of fitting cooking into a busy life isn't that intuitive. Add in a rage issue with planning like I talked about earlier (I know, I'm nuts sometimes) and not eating out doesn't REALLY fix the issue. 

SO....I have found two solutions that work for me, and want to share them with the other potential cooks who want to get a handle on their food expenses, especially with the prices of food going up all over the place now.

The first is going to sound dumb, but pinterest.com is your friend.  It brings you to a HUGE amount of cooking blogs and food sites that you might not find just googling, and offers pictures of foods  you might not have been exposed to before but could be interested in trying, and an easy place to 'pin' things to look at later.  MOST of all, it's free and no need to spend money on a cookbook, make one in your computer.

Then, start a free account at http://www.foodplannerapp.com

This site has a pro paid version, but most of the features are available in the free version, there are just ads you'll have to ignore.  Or there's another one that is $5 a month, I forget the name but I could find it again if any one wants it.  I prefer free because my goal is both organization and spending reduction, but if someone is just organization, I think the other site looked a little spiffier.   The free one seems a bit more awkward to use than the paid one, but it's not overly difficult once you poke at it a bit and figure it out.

So how this site is affecting my goals - It allows me to import recipes from websites, and enter my own.  So I'm bulding up a catalog of everything I actively cook now and want to try.  Sounds like just a cookbook, I know.  But then it has a meal planner option where I can easily create a two week plan by going to the recipes, clicking 'add plan' and it asks me for the date and breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack.  And then I can also add it to a grocery list that I can then print out or put on my phone and take with me.  It considerably cuts into how LONG it takes to meal plan, and those advice sites are right, I am reducing the amount of money I'm spending on food by planning everything and living on a 'schedule'. 

Yes, I have some internal resentment of the time it takes to plan things and losing my rights to whimsy, but I am slowly countering that with the fun of having money to save for the big things we need and to spend on entertainment because the food budget is shrinking.  I'm wasting less, spending less money, and spending less time trying to figure out what to do for meals or what my 'mood' is.  I'm not entirely sure now that my issues with giving up the 'freedom' to do whatever I like whenever I like isn't some form of my add or self-destructive part of the dismorphia disorders trying to control my behaviors, or if it's a normal emotional reaction.  I really can't tell. 

And I'm sharing this because I have picked up on that there are people here also struggling with money like I do, and maybe this can help someone else like it helped me.  Maybe not.  But I have a perspective that the legion of every day things I wasn't taught growing up which did NOT magically morph into this mythical 'well this is just common sense, you should have figured this out the minute you became a grownup!'  Some people do figure things out they weren't taught and their brains have no reason to conceive of, I don't dispute this.  But just as many are like me and these basic living skills don't magically pop up in our minds and we need to be exposed to them to learn to utilize the strategies to improve our lives and counter the others we were taught.