OK, it’s confession time.  I have been eating out WAAAAAY too much recently, and the culprit is time poverty.  Right now I do not have a single evening during the week where I don’t have something I need to be doing.  Mondays and Wednesdays I have physics class from 6-9:30 PM.  This is after the 1:25-2:20 organic chemistry lecture on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Tuesdays and Thursdays my son has football practice from 5-7 PM.  Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays I am working delivering pizzas from 4 to whenever business slows down at night.

The monster is convenience!  And convenience has its price.  Last night was a typical example: I picked my son up from football practice at 7, then we needed to head to Wal-Mart for groceries and to replace the Swiffer that broke Wednesday night and get more cleaning supplies.  There is simply no way I will walk into any place that sells groceries without eating first (NEVER ever shop for food when hungry) so we stopped at Subway on the way from football practice to Wal-Mart, got their two footlongs special, and both “waddled” around while shopping stuffed to the gills.  I can rationalize the Subway purchase of $12.86 by saying we would have impulsed much much more if we had been hungry, but the problem is this was the second grocery trip this week (as usual with a growing teenage boy in the house) with the exact same problem.

I know one solution would be to cook up a mess of food beforehand and make homemade freezer meals.  The problem is: when?  I feel like I am going in 12 different directions right now, but then I feel like a hypocrite for not getting a tighter grip on the spending even when we do the 99c value menu at Wendy’s.  It’s adding up, and it’s getting ugly.  It’s also complicated by the fact son is still in this vegetarian phase that started in the spring.

I know I can’t be the only one having this problem, so what are the ways y’all have handled this?  How can I keep this problem from eating up my debt snowball during this semester?