I have been making the same pot of soup every Sunday for four months and I think it might be the single best financial decision I have made this year
This started as a desperate measure during a particularly tight month and somehow became a habit I actually look forward to. The soup changes slightly each week depending on what is on sale or what needs to be used up, but the base is always the same: some kind of beans, whatever vegetables are cheap that week, broth I make from vegetable scraps I keep in a bag in the freezer, garlic, an onion, some spices. The whole pot costs somewhere between three and five dollars depending on the week and it makes enough for six to eight servings.
What it actually changed for me was the Tuesday through Thursday problem. Those are the days I used to be most likely to buy food because I was tired from work and didn't want to cook and there was nothing easy in the fridge. That specific combination of tired plus nothing ready equals spending money I didn't plan to spend, and it was happening more often than I wanted to admit. Having a container of soup in the fridge that just needs two minutes in the microwave removed that decision almost entirely. I stopped buying lunch at work three days a week because I just brought the soup.
I'm not going to pretend a pot of soup fixed my finances. It didn't. But it closed one specific leak that was costing me somewhere between twenty and forty dollars a week without me fully noticing it, and it did it in a way that didn't feel like deprivation. If anything the sunday cooking became somthing I genuinely enjoy now, which I did not expect at all when I started doing it out of necessity.