If you’re like most college students, you like to eat. That’s a good thing! Eating well is essential to a healthy lifestyle. But, let’s face it, college can be expensive. So how do you get the best food without breaking the bank? Here are five tips:
1. Cook At Home.
For those who have access to a kitchen, cooking at home is the best way to save money on food. Though it may be convenient, eating out is expensive and cooking at home is not that difficult.
Obviously, you still should go out from time to time, life is for a living! But, if you can make eating at home a habit, you will see tremendous savings by dodging marked-up food costs, tips, transportation, and more.
There are many recipes available online, and there are also a number of cookbooks available for purchase that can give you some great ideas.
2. Shop At The Right Places.
There are a lot of different places to buy food, and not all of them are equally affordable. For the best deals, stick to grocery stores or big box stores like Aldi’s, Wegmans, and Walmart.
Better yet, if you can get to wholesale clubs like Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJs, you can save tons on the same food you would buy anywhere else. For a small membership fee, you can be saving tens of dollars each grocery trip.
Make sure to avoid convenience stores and restaurants, which tend to be much more expensive. This can be especially hard when you live on campus, since campus shops tend to be grossly overpriced.
If you don’t have transportation, you can try Amazon grocery delivery or meal delivery services.
3. Consider Meal Delivery Services.
Meal delivery services are becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason. Not only do they save you the hassle of grocery shopping and meal prep, but they can also save you money.
The way meal delivery services work is that you sign up and choose a plan. Each week, you’ll be sent a box of ingredients for a set number of meals, which you pre-select each week. The recipes are usually pretty easy and can be made in 30 minutes or less.
Prices for meal delivery services vary depending on the company, but they typically start around $60 per week. That might sound like a lot, but when you break it down, it’s only about $10 per serving and you get 2 servings per meal. That’s not bad, and will even let you cook less, alternating between cooking and leftovers each day.
I personally am a big fan of meal delivery services and have been blown away by the food quality.
One Of My Favorite Meal Delivery Services:
EveryPlate’s goal is to provide delectable meals at an affordable rate. Customers appreciate fresh, high-quality dishes thanks to EveryPlate’s reliable suppliers and creative chefs who ensure that everything recipe is delicious. Simply sign up and choose from 25 delicious recipes that change each week!
Try EveryPlate At $1.49/Meal!
4. Make Coffee At Home.
Now you have to enjoy life, and for many coffee is life, but that $6 latte every day adds up quickly! If you cut back your Starbucks orders to a few times a week from every day, you can save loads of cash quickly and easily.
Coffee may just be the biggest papercut that students’ finances face. That $6 cut every day amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. Just plug it into our paper cut tool and see for yourself.
If you like the convenience and taste of that Starbucks coffee try this.
Firstly, order your latte from Starbucks 50% of the time (you have to enjoy the little things sometimes)
Now for the other 50% of the time. Get an automatic coffee pot from Amazon, the Black+Decker Programmable Coffee Maker is a great option that costs 5 lattes and can let you wake up to hot coffee.
Better yet, use scheduled shipping from Amazon to get your favorite Starbucks blend delivered to your door as you need it.
You will save loads of money and be able to have your coffee ready for you each morning. No more tired walks/drives to the coffee shop before class.
5. Utilize Dining Halls.
For those who use meal plans at college, there is no better way to spend your “meal swipes” than at a dining hall. Dining halls usually have all-you-can-eat meals with a huge selection. This means that you not only can have food prepared by someone else but can have as much as you want. The value is insane.
Please note that different colleges have different policies with regard to meals, but many have a set number of swipes that can either get you meals from on-campus shops or get you into all-you-can-eat dining halls.
Sometimes it’s worth spending dining points on a treat like a delicious Jamba Juice, but try to balance these special occasion meal purchases with the great value of dining halls.
Great Food At A Great Value.
Eating can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be if you use some simple value purchasing techniques. You can still enjoy a treat from time to time, but by cutting back slightly on things like eating out and buying lattes every day, you’ll save yourself a lot of money in the long run and still get to enjoy the good things in life! Remember, it’s the little papercuts that hurt you just a little bit every day that end up costing you the most in the long run. Small changes to daily habits will reap huge rewards.
