Settle The Debate: We Keep Fighting Over The Cost Of Freezer Meals

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. My husband and I, we keep fighting and I just want to know if he's right. We keep fighting about buying prepared foods while in baby step two. Is he right? What's a prepared food? So like frozen meals or like prepared lasagna or in particular, I buy these chicken burrito bowls to eat while I'm at my second job. Are you guys aligned on everything else? Yes. What's the problem? The quality or the price? Because that stuff is not expensive. I don't think it's expensive at all. The chicken bowls are $13.97 and Keith says I can make them, but I prep our lunches for during the week. What are you spending? We spend about $200 every two weeks. Okay, so $400 a month. What's your household income? I make $61 and he makes $58. Okay, and you're attacking debt obviously with intensity. Yes. And so how much debt are you attacking? We have $45 in student loans and then $37 in credit cards and then $195 in our house, but unfortunately his mother passed away so we just inherited $104. Which is going to clear all your debts? Everything but the house. And you're not going to be in baby step two anymore. Right. And so then it doesn't matter if you buy prepared meals anymore. And by the way, it didn't matter before either. If you were spending $400, if you spend $100 a week on groceries, that's really, really good. It's really low. It's really low. Now if he says to you, you're responsible for the meals and I don't like this food, I don't enjoy it, can we please do something else? That's fair. But if he's saying on price alone, I would disagree with what he's saying. Okay, let me tell you what normally happens when I've been coaching people in these situations. That we've found one thing that absolutely doesn't matter to argue about, but there's a whole lot of big things that we should have been arguing about that we're not. Like he's still buying $2,000 guns or something and bitching about a $13 burrito. That's what I find a lot of times. Or he, you know, or you're buying something else that he's really frustrated about, but he's pointing it over here at the burrito instead. Yeah. Am I missing something? I mean, is there a coach person, the story that I missed? No, I think maybe you got, you guys are in complete 100% agreement. There's no argument about everything else in your budget and you're running a $400 food budget. Yeah. I guess the only thing different in our budgeting that we want to do is I want to take Rachel's suggestion and add a stupid line item for those things that just pop up. And he doesn't want to do that. He's a tight one. Well, no, he's, he's trying to be very, very intense, but, um, but, but we're, here's the problem. You end up, if you lose the wife, if you lose the spouse over a $13 burrito, you didn't win the war. And you threw the baby out with the bath water. Okay. Now, again, she's not trying to buy a $6,000 coach purse. Okay. This is, there's no Louis Vuitton in this discussion. There's no, um, expensive firearms in this discussion or whatever it is that we want to talk about boy toys and girl toys or whatever. Okay. That's not in the discussion. So this is simply, okay. So what I'm going to coach him to do is this, um, you win the argument because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. $13 does not fix your all's life. Okay. So you win the argument, but he needs to, uh, learn the art of letting you win some battles so that we win the war of working on this together. It's more important. It's 99% important that both of you stay enthused and pointed at the problem. It's 1% important as to whether you buy a burrito. Right. You got me. So there might be a dollar or two technicality and Jade's better expert on food. She says, there's not, she says it's not out of line, but even if it was, even if it was $5 more in a $400 budget, he could win the math, but, but it's stupid. Yeah. You're going to lose your wife for $5. He's right. You're, it's going to be cheaper for you to cook everything from scratch, but $400 is a fair budget item. Like that's a fair amount to spit on groceries. It's very low, very, very low. Yeah. Very low as it is. We don't see that hardly ever. So overall you win the argument. But if I had him on the line, I would coach him and say, dude, more important that she's enthused and focused on the overall plan than the $13 burrito. What she's asking is not so far out there. Yeah. It's like when I asked my husband to make up the bed and he makes up the bed, but he does it a little bit different than the way I do it. And if I get onto him, then you get to make it up. Pretty soon he ain't making up the bed. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's almost like that happened this weekend. Oh, that, oh, did we just bring up a real analogy, a real metaphor? Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, yeah, if you're going to gripe about the way I do it, you get to do it, you know, and so you lose the battle of helping with housework over the wrinkle in the corner of the bed. It's the same thing. So let's get on the same page. Let's decide what's really important here. What's really important is we get out of debt, stay out of debt. We're generous when we build wealth and we're on a plan together. That's right. This is what causes people to be wealthy, not $13 burritos or the lack of them. You're really caught up on this burrito. Either one. Well, I'll tell you what's flashing through my head is those stupid bags of chicken breasts from Sam. Yeah. We lived on those things when we were broke and I hate those things to this day. Anytime I'm in a restaurant, fine dining or otherwise, we have a chicken breast. No, thank you. No way. The other one was tuna fish. Yeah, I remember you said that. She would make tuna fish sandwiches and I would take them to work and they would be in the work refrigerator and by lunch they'd be soggy. When I smell tuna fish, my net worth goes down now. Just the smell of it reminds me of being broke. It's cat food. It's just somebody else needs to eat that health food because I'm not doing it. It's that simple. I can't do it. It reminds me of being broke. I totally get it. It's just the smell of it. I smell it and I feel broke. I feel that that's how I am with the last time I ate it. It was like soggy sat there in the refrigerator. The bread gets, Oh God, it's so gross. And so that's the, you know, that's the stuff he's going to remember. Now they're going to remember the $13 burrito or whatever. When they they're the side of this someday and they're millionaires or baby step millionaires. And we had this stupid discussion over that. Yeah. The other one that was funny was Sharon. I had this huge fight. Three little kids because I thought same. I'm that guy spinning too much of the grocery store. And she's like, all right, King genius, get your butt in the car and let's go to Kroger. And we go up and down the aisle. And you know what I discovered? She was doing a pretty good job. I love it. And my level of criticism for her future be deal-making on the groceries was none at all. Because otherwise I get to do it and I couldn't do any better anyway. But I had this opinion from afar that I had this figured out until I got marched down the aisle of Kroger. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.