What ends up happening, as we roll into what I think would be the second reason, is that, because we have to eat every day, because we have to provide something for ourselves every day, we fall easily into the convenience trap.

And the convenience trap is drive-through or takeout or Uber Eats or DoorDash or whatever is near you. We live so much in the moment, and I feel like with food, and then having to pay for food, we just do it in the moment.

What we don’t do is we don’t calculate that in the moment. We don’t calculate backwards to how much we’ve already spent on food, and we don’t calculate how much we will be spending on food if we keep up these convenience type food habits.

Why are we so bad at estimating our food budget?

Typically, we kind of have a ballpark idea of how much we spend on groceries, because you go to the store, you spend $125-ish a week. Okay, that’s $500 dollars a month on groceries.

But what we don’t add up is every time we’re swiping our debit card in the drive-through or grabbing lunch or whatever. Not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t do those things. They can be part of your budget. But they need to be part of your budget.

Where do you still struggle with your food budget?

Thursdays, I call it my Trigger Dinner day. I just can’t do dinner on Thursdays. I don’t know why. I’m a food blogger, I cook for a living basically. But somehow Thursdays is just really hard for me personally.

So, I have figured out that Thursdays is now going to just have to be a slow cooker meal because I just need to do it in the morning, because there’s just something about Thursday afternoons, I just have a mental block. I’m tired at that point. I’ve done a lot of work for the week. I’ve Ubered my kids all over town already. I’m just kind of over it.

But I figured out that was my tough day, so I figured out how to get around that. But I think it’s just that awareness of what are my trouble spots. Maybe it’s you’re going out to lunch too much, or maybe you need to cut your coffee habit.

Whatever it is, you need to come up with an alternative first, right? With any habit change, right, you need to come up with an alternative. So my Thursday night, just don’t want to cook dinner. Going to bust through the drive-through. My habit changes is that’s now a slow cooker day.