Living an awesome life is easier when you can free up some time and money to do so. W- and I bought a chest freezer more than a month ago, and it’s been great.

When we analyzed whether or not a chest freezer would work, we realized that most of the usual monetary savings didn’t apply to us.

• W- and I already prepare practically all of our meals, so we wouldn’t see significant savings from just dining in more often.
• We already shop the sales, so bulk buying isn’t that much of a big deal.
• The supermarket is walking distance from our house, so there go fuel costs as well.
• Our vegetable garden is just getting off the ground, and we’ve been eating all the fruits and vegetables as they come up. (Although the squirrels sometimes beat us to it!) No savings yet from storing garden produce, then.
• Supermarket shopping and cooking are usually social, relationship-building times for us, so the time savings aren’t that big either.

We wanted to explore freezing more food in individual portions, though, to cut down on cooking time during the week.

So far, our new freezer-enhanced routines have been wonderful. Here are the key benefits we’ve seen:

You can make and store your own convenience foods. When we have time (usually every weekend or every other weekend), we make a big batch of food and store them as frozen lunches and dinners. This means we can have our favourite foods practically any time we want, with enough variety to keep things from being monotonous. (Although I don’t mind eating the same thing a number of times in a row!) Our evenings are freed up for reading, hanging out, or cramming in a little bit of work, and in the morning, lunch is all ready to go. Good stuff!

I also keep freezer bags of frozen biscuits (home-made!) for snacks and entertaining. This makes it much easier to host tea parties, and the conversation makes my life that much more awesome.

You can stock up. We try to buy things on sale as much as possible, so the cost savings from stocking up aren’t significant. But it is nice to know that we can (almost always) reach in and pull out our favourite things.

You can extend the life of other things. We keep a bag of milk powder in the freezer. The milk powder’s part of our emergency kit, but the bag had more than what we needed, so we keep it in cold storage to extend its life.

The chest freezer takes up space, uses electricity, and requires an up-front investment. But it’s definitely been worth it for us, and I’m glad we got it. If you’ve been thinking about getting a chest freezer and you have more questions, please feel free to leave a comment!