How can you save money on food? Well, fortunately, dieting isn't your only option. Here are a bunch of good ideas:

  • Eat out less, and prepare food at home more. You can be smart when eating out, too. Study coupons carefully. A McDonald's coupon might give you two Big Macs for the price of one, but if you like double cheeseburgers, you can probably buy two of them off the Value Menu for less money.
  • Use coupons at the supermarket, or at least focus your purchases on items that are on sale.
  • Cook twice as much as you need, and freeze half. Then, when you don't have much time, instead of going out or ordering in, you can simply heat up something from the freezer.
  • Discover homemade soup. It's cheap to make, tasty to eat, healthy, and filling.
  • Cook from scratch when you can. It's often cheaper than using prepared foods. (For example, spaghetti sauce is easy to make and you can make and freeze a lot of it.)
  • Cover your pots when you cook. Doing so consumes less energy.
  • Re-engineer leftovers into new meals.
  • Make banana bread with aging bananas. (You can pop these bananas into the freezer until you have time to thaw and use them.)
  • Use special plastic bags with holes in them to prolong the life of your veggies.
  • Use powdered milk in baked goods -- there's little taste difference and a great dollar difference.
  • Rework your recipes. If a recipe calls for one pound of beef and you only have half a pound, you might prepare the recipe with what you have, instead of running out to buy more. With many recipes, you might save money by strategically substituting or eliminating some ingredients.
  • Don't waste food.
  • Take up gardening. You can grow some of your own food.
  • Become a little more vegetarian in your eating. Meat is often the most expensive part of a meal. Enjoy meatless meals more often, or reduce the amount of meat in each meal.

You'll find many more handy tips on our Living Below Your Means discussion board, where most of the suggestions above originated. The board's directory of tips is especially handy. Once you've saved some money, put it to work for you -- learn more in our savings center (which features some special interest-rate deals).