Cooking at home can save a lot of money as opposed to eating out all the time. We all know that, right? If not, here’s a big green chart to drill it in, taken from How Much Money Do You Save by Cooking at Home? by Wellio:

Here’s what that means on a monthly basis:

Being a good home cook should be viewed as a valuable skill – one that takes an investment of time and effort, but can pay dividends forever. You may not eat at a restaurant or do meal prep every day, but I know that some of you dual-income high-earners are dropping around $1,500 a month on food. That’s closing in on $20,000 a year. Your grandparents probably spent a fraction of that. Converting even a couple of those meals a week can multiply into real money. (Not to mention that home-cooked meals have helped with my weight loss and health goals. Eating out a lot seems to always correlate with weight gain for me.)

The problem is that if you haven’t developed the skill, it’s just too painful. You work hard and are exhausted at the end of the day, why tackle another difficult project? For me, if I have to make an extra stop at the grocery store, I’d rather just stop at the korean BBQ place and buy it ready-to-eat.

If you are just starting out, you can’t expect to be able to whip up a nutritious and tasty meal with the ingredients in your pantry in 30 minutes. You need to set yourself up for success. You need to divide and conquer. On the weekend, you should pick out one or two “easy” recipes that look appetizing to you and buy all of the ingredients that you need. Don’t wait to “pick it up on the way home”. Buy it on the weekend, and carve out 30 minutes of prep time on two weekdays. Remind yourself that it takes time to prepare a meal prep kit too, or even drive somewhere to get take-out. (Okay, Uber Eats and Grubhub are pretty darn convenient. But those delivery fees and tips add up fast!)

This is summarized in my Cooking at Home Flowchart:

Once you have some “go-to” weekday meals, you can schedule them and rotate as desired. Once you get a lot of recipes into memory, then you can start to improvise. I’m sorry, but newbies can’t go straight into thinking of recipes as Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Maybe if you were the culinary equivalent of Beethoven. I’ve made hundreds of sheet-pan dinners (I like Melissa Clark recipes) and one-pot meals and I still get stuck if I don’t have things thought out ahead of time. If you learn to prep, then that one weekend grocery stop can equal 5 weeknight meals.

Wellio is a food prep company that offers to help you out with recipes and shopping lists. I haven’t used them, but I like that they are trying to attack the pain points in home cooking. I’ve mentioned them previously in Which Meals Offers The Most Nutrition Per Dollar?

Need a break from the charts? Morgan Housel has an insightful article Let Me Convince You To Save Money that includes no historical data, no survey results, no fancy infographics. Read the whole thing, but here’s my favorite excerpt:

But the best reason to save is to gain control over your time. Everyone knows the tangible stuff money buys. The intangible stuff is harder to wrap your head around, but can be far more valuable and able to increase your happiness. Savings gives you options and flexibility, the ability to wait and the opportunity to pounce. It gives you time to think. Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself.

In my experience, every incremental bit of savings changes your life in intangible ways. Going from paycheck-to-paycheck to having $1,500 in the bank lets many things become minor speed-bumps instead of derailing your life. It’ll also make you happier according to (sorry!) the research: Does Cash Make You Happier Than Income or Paying Down Debt?

Continuing onward, going from having a basic emergency fund to $10,000 gives you the ability to take career risks without fear of starvation. You feel like you can put your full effort into a new business, or take a different job with less stress. I personally made a life-changing career switch at about $50,000 net worth.

Finally, going from $10,000 to $100,000 is amazing because that’s when you realize that reaching financial independence is a matter of WHEN, not IF. It’s a sign that you’ve put in the dirty work and figured out the hard bits. To put it crudely, “The first $100,000 is a b****.”

In biology, the term robustness refers to the “persistence of a system under perturbations or conditions of uncertainty”. In computer science, robustness is the ability to “cope with errors during execution and cope with erroneous input”.

In today’s world of questionable safety nets, having adequate savings improves the robustness of your family’s lifestyle. First, you can endure an expected car repair. Then you can endure a temporary blip without a job. Finally, you can go without a job whenever you wish (aka retirement). Your savings rate fuels all of that.

If you wanted to shave $1,000 a year off your housing expenses, you’d have to move or at least refinance a mortgage. That takes a pile of paperwork and lots of time. Meanwhile, with a few clicks on a website and a SIM swap, many people on a major carrier plan can easily save $1,000 on their annual cell phone bill. I just transfered my service to Sprint’s Free Year of Unlimited promotion (extended to 7/30) and my new bill is $3 a month per line including all taxes and fees. Took maybe 15 minutes of my time.

The average cell phone bill has dropped by over 12% from a year ago. If you haven’t shopped around in a while, you might be missing out on big savings. The WSJ article The New Sticker Shock: Plunging Cellphone Bills (paywall?) shows us how cell phone bills are dropping across the board:

Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint have all been losing net customers this year. Most went to either T-Mobile or various MVNO/prepaid providers which can provide 95%+ of the coverage at a fraction of the cost. (MVNOs don’t have the same roaming agreements as a postpaid major carrier.) Sprint was both a smaller competitor and losing customers, so apparently they felt they had to do something drastic.

I expect to switch to either T-Mobile or an MVNO after my year is up, unless Sprint can come up with another deal.

Update April 2017. Digit is now a paid service. After a 100-day free trial, Digit will charge a $2.99 monthly subscription. If you are a current user, you also get another 100 days free but after that they will start taking $2.99 out of your linked checking account automatically. If you don’t want this to happen, you need to close your Digit account at this link. All your Digit balances will be moved back into your linked checking account.

I am disappointed Digit couldn’t make their business model work by simply earning interest off people’s savings balances. While some people criticized that aspect, I thought it was a fair trade-off. Although transparency is good in theory, my prediction is most people will balk at paying $3 a month. Digit has increased their Savings Bonus to 1% annualized (previously it was 0.20%). However, you can earn that at online banks elsewhere.

Updated full review:

Want to save more, but don’t want to actually think about it? Digit is a fintech start-up that combines a FDIC-insured savings account that want you to give it permission to tuck some of your own money away for you. There’s mindless eating, mindless spending, and now mindless saving.

How does it work? Instead of rounding up your card purchases or getting you to commit a regular savings schedule, Digit is like a helicopter parent sneaking into your wallet/purse and taking out money when it thinks you won’t notice. Okay, so it’s more about an algorithm that tracks your income and spending patterns… and then takes out money when it thinks you won’t notice. It keeps on depositing that money into a savings account until hopefully one day you have something substantial Here’s a slick video about it:

SMS Text-based interface. After you link up an existing checking account, ongoing interactions with Digit can be done almost completely by text message. If you prefer apps, Digit now has an iOS app that offers a little bit of extra polish to your normal text message program. I thought it might be redundant, but I actually prefer using the app now. A few screenshots:

 

Free. $2.99 a month. Digit used to make money by keeping any interest that might be earned on your savings balance. As of April 11, 2017, they now offer a 100-day free trial and then will charge a $2.99 monthly subscription fee. The good news is that you now earn more interest, currently a 1% annual Savings Bonus (details below). They still promise not to sell your transaction data.

Minimum balance protection. I actually started using Digit a few months ago, but turned it off when I found out they didn’t (at the time) have a minimum balance protection feature. For example, you might have a bank account that requires a $1,000 minimum daily balance to avoid a $10 monthly fee. Digit used to have no way of knowing that, although they did promise to refund any overdraft fees. Now, you can set a minimum value that Digit will not allow your account to go below.

Savings Bonus. Essentially, Digit pays you interest on your balances with them including your Rainy Day balance and any Goalmojis. Every 3 months you will receive a Savings Bonus from Digit based on your average total balance over the previous 3 months. Currently Digit pays a annual 1% Savings bonus. So for example if your average balance was $4,000 over the last 3 months you would get a $10.00 savings bonus that quarter.

My personal experience. Every few days, random amount like $5.22 or $11.35 would be debited from my checking account. Honestly, for some who likes to be in control, having all those extra entries on my bank statements got to be a bit annoying. After a couple months though, I had over $300 saved up. Was this amount more than I would have saved anyway? Would I be better off with a formal budget? It’s hard to say. I can imagine some people really liking the feeling of “found money”, though.

Recap. Digit offers mindless automated saving, which is definitely a unique proposition. After a 100-day free trial, Digit will charge a $2.99 monthly subscription fee. You’ll have to balance that fee with their ability to save you money that you wouldn’t otherwise. You might prefer giving someone else the steering wheel. You might not. If previously-reviewed Qapital was “set-your-own-rules”, Digit is more “leave-it-up-to-the-robots”. You could even use both apps at the same time.