I'm thrifty as well but that is stretching it.
I mean, I eat meat and only buy organic free range stuff if I can, which is of course, more expensive, but as long as I make a dev salary, why would I eat lower quality stuff to save a few bucks if I can afford the best quality?
I feel like when it comes to what you put inside your body you should not make compromises if you can. There are other areas in your life you can save money(car, subscription services, eating out, fancy clothes), but food is not one of them, as long as you can afford it.
Every Saturday we make a plan for the next week. For example last week we had (note that we don't buy prepared meals):
(Day: lunch / dinner)
Monday: Salad + egg + wrap / Udon soup (spring onions, asian noodles, tofu, miso, egg)
Tuesday: Salad + beans + wrap / Chili sin carne + rice
Wednesday: Salad + veg. schnitzel + wrap / Sweet potato curry
Thursday: Salad + roasted vegetables + wrap / Backed potatoes + mix of vegetables
Friday: Porridge + apples / Carrots in oven + smashed potatoes
Saturday: Pancakes + leftovers / Vegetables soup + bread
Sunday: Brunch (fruits, joghurts, cheese, bread, etc) / Pizza
We now have a list of maybe 20-25 recipes we rotate between, cooking takes a bit of time but that's something I really like to do to relax. I personally do not eat the morning and my life partner eats some simple cereals + joghurt + fruits. Food like chili sin carne or a curry is something ridiculously cheap to do and is very easy to do in huge quantities. Also we really like to eat wraps filled with salad for lunch as you can see :). If you alternate the filling and salad sauces that's not too boring and doesn't result in an after-lunch food comas!
We buy almost everything at Lidl and do not eat meat.
Basic ingredients are cheap as long as we ignore quality and where I live, you're not getting any good quality wine and cheese in your 5 Euros a day.
Cheap supermarket budget brands full of chemicals, hormones and preservatives? Yes. Quality stuff? No.
As for diet - A typical day would like this.
Breakfast.
(them) Home made pancakes for breakfast with a drizzle of honey. (me) Muesli.
Lunch, Salad Wrap/veggie heavy (other half is vegetarian) or KaposztáS TéSzta (cabbage/noodles).
Evening Meal - Spaghetti Carbonara or Tuna Steaks/veggies.
My other half loves cooking (she's hungarian) and it's completely the norm that for her/where she is from to just do everything from scratch.
Lots of fresh seasonal veggies, lots of soups, noodles, pasta etc - it's a good diet tbh and seems to suit my health issues.
This is in the EU, regulation basically prevents excesses like that in most cases.
Furthermore, price doesn’t have to be a predictor of quality. E.g. LIDL/Aldi (budget chains) commonly win awards for best vegetables.
I used to spend ~150-200 on food per month when I was living by myself and wasn’t strictly managing it for low cost. Now with a family of 3, we spend 300-400€ a month on groceries (incl bread and meat) and are never holding back on anything because of price.
So, 5€ per day doesn’t sound unreasonable even in the Netherlands. Note: we eat vegetarian 5 out of 7 days, without that we’d probably spend 100-150 more.
Edit: I get that this doesn’t work everywhere. When I lived in the US (NYC) and tried to cook my own meals I couldn’t believe 1) how few supermarkets there were and 2) how high prices for basic food were. Eating out was basically cheaper :/
During this season it’s also soup time. Our favorite is butternut two oignons a bit of butter and cream or coco milk. Super cheap. Makes 2 to 4 servings depending on dilution and veggie size. Add 1€ for bread (for 2). And bit of cheese and / or fruit.
But the thing is, a lot of people could easily make additional 7k€ if they switched jobs / renegotiated their salary / tried out other ways to make more money. Especially if you enjoy eating out from time to time, it's probably not worth the effort to try and save a few thousand not doing it when there are other, much more impactful choices to be made.
Instead it’s far more likely the most efficient way to get more money is to work on your career and not learn how to cook well, fix your own car, or extend your commute way out into the country.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have a hobby of cooking, if that’s what you love—go for it, but be honest with yourself. If it was about getting to FIRE you should order in a pizza and working on leetcode.
Having googled this I presume you meant Financial Independence Retire Early.
Health insurance is also really expensive as an employee, but people dont notice because half of the cost is completely hidden for them ("paid" by the employer) and the other half also never reaches their bank account but is on listed in the monthly payroll notification.
It is as compulsory as the others.
I'm curious, what role does health insurance play in Germany? I'm been curious about the prospect of at least temporarily living in Germany (from Canada), but don't have a great sense of that yet. Here we have socialized medical, but you'd get insurance to cover out of country emergencies, regular cost of drugs, and dental, among other things.
Snacks can be a bit more expensive, but it's still (literal) peanuts in the budget.
I do shop at Lidl, and I do pick the store brand most of the time. However, I don't consciously try to save money on groceries. Good food is good living.
- Eating out is a big expense. I eat quite well on 5€ a day. Eating out would cost me about 25€ a day. That's a 7k€ per year difference.
- Housing is a huge, but mostly unavoidable expense. Yet my rent went from 950€/month to 550€/month when I moved out of the centre.
- Health insurance is another big expense. At one point I paid more for insurance than rent, because I'm self-employed.
- The things I tend to skimp on (subscriptions, quality food) make nearly no difference.