Organizing Our Cupboards to reduce cost

Take your cupboards from messy to efficient in a few easy steps

I won’t lie Matt and I are not good about eating at home. I think our monthly budgets and fast food spending show that. With our current work schedules we often choose fast over healthy most days.

Another reason we find it hard to eat at home is half the time I don’t even know what food is actually in our cupboards. They used to look like this. I’m embarrassed to say we would end up throwing a lot of food away sometimes a year or more past its expiration date. We just didn’t know what was up there. During our No spend weekend we took some time to clean out our cupboards and rearrange them. They are now much more organized and make it easy to see exactly what products we have. First we went through all our food and threw away the expired items then I organized our boxed items by type and date as you can see. To keep it simple for us I wrote the expiration date on the front of each box for easy reading. This will help us see what foods we have available and let me know what items I need to stock back up on when they go on sale. I actually thought we had Hamburger Helper coming out our ears and didn't buy any the last time it went on sale, in reality we're down to three boxes. If I wouldn't have realized this we would have run out and I would have ended up buying it off sale. We will also always know when our food is getting ready to expire. By putting the closest expiration date in the front we can make sure we’re eating our stuff before it goes to waste. What’s the point of saving money on food to just throw it away two years later?

Eating what we have on hand before buying McDonald's is an easy step to becoming more frugal for my household.