How you spend your money has a much bigger impact than most people realize, not just on your finances, but on your health, time, and independence.
This isn’t about deprivation or sacrifice. It’s about getting more out of money you’re already spending, and once you start looking at purchases that way, things start to shift.
When I’m actually at the grocery store, I keep to a pretty simple route: through the vegetable section, then meat and dairy, then out through the health food section. I only wander into the other aisles when I actually need something specific there. It’s a good habit, because the baskets loaded with boxed and packaged food tend to cost more and deliver less nutrition than the same money spent on real ingredients.
The Costco Chicken Trick
Here’s the clearest example I’ve got. There are two of us in my house, so I buy two Costco rotisserie chickens at $4.99 each. This works with just one chicken too, but two makes better soup.
When I get them home, I cut the breasts off, four total, and cut off the legs and thighs, four pieces, good for two meals. Then I portion everything out: one breast for dinner that night, two more breasts for another dinner later, one breast sliced up for sandwich meat, and two packages of legs and thighs, two pieces per package, straight into the freezer with a vacuum sealer.
Most people throw the carcass away at that point. That’s the mistake. Every carcass makes a genuinely good bone broth or chicken soup, and that’s the real “spend it once, benefit twice” part, the soup most people never bother making.
So here’s how $9.98 breaks down: three chicken breast dinners, two leg-and-thigh dinners, about four soup dinners, and two large sandwiches from the sliced breast. Since there are two of us, each dinner counts as two meals. That’s 20 meals total from two chickens, about 50 cents a meal.
Someone could argue they’d eat more than that in one sitting, sure, but if you eat the whole chicken in one meal and skip the soup, you’re missing the entire point.
The Night You’re Too Tired to Cook
This happens to everyone. You’re too tired to cook, but somehow you’ve got the energy to change clothes, walk to the car, drive to town, wait 20 minutes to be seated, sit through slow service because the place is busy, and if you’ve got kids, deal with them getting restless through all of it. Then you drive home.
I live 15 to 20 minutes from the nearest restaurant, so that whole trip runs 1.5 to 2 hours, even a quick pizza run barely comes in under 1.5 hours. Add one drink each and a tip, and these days a family dinner out is easily over $100.
Worth knowing too: restaurants generally spend around 33 cents of every dollar you pay on the actual food. So on a $39.99 steak, roughly $13 of that is food, the rest is covering the building, the staff, and everything else that goes into running the place. Nothing wrong with paying for that experience now and then, but it’s worth knowing what you’re actually paying for.
Here’s the alternative: pull that chicken soup out of the freezer, add toast and a salad, dinner’s ready in 30 minutes or less. Same benefit-twice math, about 50 cents a meal, maybe a little more with the bread and salad.
How I Actually Make the Soup
Making bone broth sounds like a project, and if you try to do it all in one sitting, it is one. So I don’t. I spread it across whatever spare time I actually have over a few days.
When I’m home and have an hour or two, I get the carcass simmering on the stove until the meat falls off the bone, then let it cool and put it in the fridge. The next day, once it’s cool, I pull the bones out and either get the soup going again or put it back in the fridge until I’ve got more time. Along the way, whenever I’m already chopping onions, carrots, or celery for a salad, I chop a little extra and bag it for the soup, so I’m just doing a bit more of something I’m already doing anyway, not starting a separate project. Once the vegetables are ready, I put the soup together and let it simmer on another day I’m home, then portion it into vacuum-seal bags and freeze it.
My wife used to laugh at my soup-making process. These days, on the nights we’re both too tired to cook, she’s the first one reaching into the freezer for it.
Don’t Let the Rest Go to Waste Either
If I only buy one chicken, I’ll still save the carcass in a gallon zip-lock bag in the freezer, since I like having at least two carcasses in the pot when I make soup, and not every chicken in the house comes from Costco anyway.
The same thinking applies beyond chicken. Banana bread from old bananas and zucchini bread from an overload of zucchini are the obvious ones, but I like to get more creative than that and just build a meal out of whatever’s sitting in the fridge. A neighbor gave us some okra one night, and I had green beans, tomatoes, and zucchini on hand, so I chopped it all up, added a can of Italian stewed tomatoes, seasoned it, and served it over rice. Some of our best meals have come from stuff that would’ve otherwise gone in the trash.
Growing Food Completes the Circle
Growing even a little of your own food multiplies the value even further. I save my own lettuce seed every year, and it’s easier than people think. Lettuce goes to seed the same year you plant it, you just let one plant keep growing past the point you’d normally harvest it. It’ll flower, then turn into a fuzzy puff, kind of like a dandelion. Once it’s dried out and mature, you just rub the base below the puff between your fingers and the seeds fall right out.
Lettuce doesn’t cross-pollinate easily, so you don’t need much separation between varieties. I just pick a plant growing in the middle of the others and I’ve never had a problem with the seed coming true. One plant will give you more seed than you’ll plant the next year unless you’re growing commercially, and lettuce seed keeps for about three years, longer if you store it well.
Food, skills, and next year’s harvest, all from one small effort you were already halfway doing.
This is one reason starting small with food production makes such a difference.
The Real Point
You can’t put a price on better health, avoiding illness, or the confidence that comes with knowing you can handle things yourself. But it all matters. We rarely think twice about spending money on things that don’t do us any good, yet we overanalyze spending on the things that actually help us.
Once you start looking for the second benefit hiding in something you’re already paying for, money stops feeling so tight.
This way of thinking fits naturally with why skills matter more than where you live.
What to Do Now
Look at what you already spend money on, food, tools, household items, and ask one simple question: can this give me more than one benefit? That question alone changes how you look at almost everything you buy.
Money is only one of the resources a household has. The Home Economy Guide covers time, tools, and skills too.
