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Posts Tagged ‘Meal’

Meal planning can help you to successfully organize the daily routine of preparing meals for your family.

If you often find yourself searching for something to prepare for dinner, meal planning may be just the thing you need to make meal time less stressful.

Below are some of the benefits of meal planning.

1. You’ll save time.

Knowing what you’re going to cook for dinner means you can get the meal on the table faster because you won’t have to decide what to make.

In addition, when you plot out what meals you’re going to fix for the week, you can simply make one trip to the store and buy all the food you’ll need for those meals.

You won’t have to search the refrigerator or freezer when dinner time arrives, and you can eliminate trips to the grocery store looking for something to eat that everyone likes.

2. You’ll save money.

Meal planning can also help you save money.

For one, when you know what you’re going to cook for dinner, you won’t eat out as much during the week because you can’t think of anything appealing to make.

By simply eating at home more instead of eating out, you’ll keep more money in your pocket that you can use for other important things.

3. You’ll be able to eat healthier.

If you tend to eat burgers and fries from fast food places a few times a week, meal planning can help you to eat healthier by replacing those meals with healthier ones.

Instead of greasy, fatty hamburgers or having pizza delivered, you could have a nutritious meal of vegetables, salad and a lean main course of chicken or beef for dinner.

In addition, if you need to restrict sugar or salt from your diet, menu planning can help you to consistently cook meals that fit your nutritional standards and stick to your diet.

4. You’ll be able to reduce meal time stress.

If you have your dinners planned out, you won’t have to figure out what to make while everyone is hungry and in bad moods.

You’ll already know what you’re going to make, and dinner time can go smoothly as everyone looks forward to the delicious meal they’re going to eat.

5. Meal planning is easy.

Planning what you’re going to prepare for dinner over the weekdays isn’t difficult.

It just takes a little time to decide beforehand what you want to eat, and then purchase the food.

You can plan your dinners for the week days, the entire week or longer.

However, start small by planning out, for example, five dinners for the weekdays.

Once you see what’s involved, you’ll have a better idea how many meals and how far ahead you’d like to plan.

Conclusion: Meal planning can help you to save money and time. Meal planning can also help you to eat healthier, reduce meal time stress, and isn’t difficult to do.

After you start meal planning, you may find that dinner time becomes family time again.

I asked my CPA why are there two separate deductions for meals. – 50% Deductible or 100% Deductible.
I thought all business meals were deductible!
He explained to me that there are several specific rules to determine if a meal is a legitimate business expense or not. These rules are set to meet the business purpose requirement and the ordinary and necessary requirement of the business. Ordinary and necessary are some KEY words you will see we use in many of our articles and educational tools.

The General Rule is:

Meals are generally 50% deductible. This means when a business pays for a meal, only 50% of that amount is deducted on the tax return. It’s extremely important to know the exceptions to this rule because some meals are
100% deductible!

Meals that are 50% deductible include:
– Meals with customers, prospects, clients and vendors.
– Meals with employees, partners or directors
– Meals during business travel
– Meals while attending a class, convention, seminar, certification course or away from home over 50 miles

What are the exceptions to the rules that make the meal 100% deductible according to my CPA?

– Meals for the business party or other social event ((group meeting, holiday party, company picnic)

– Meals provided on the employer’s premises to more than half of the employees for the convenience of the employer. An
example of this is when a business provides meals to employees in order to keep them working over time to keep the employees at the office.
– Snacks provided to employees within the office. This includes coffee, water, soda, donuts, etc..snacks.
– Meals where the business is reimbursed for the expense. An example, if a business takes a client to lunch and in turn
bills the client for that lunch in a separate line item on the invoice, then the business can fully deduct that meal.

Some professionals (accountants,CPA’s and attorney’s) invoice their customers for the meals as a separate line item. This makes the meal expense fully deductible to them and makes it 50% deductible to the client. If the meal expense is not specifically itemized on the invoice (include in their hourly or service fee), then the
meal is only 50% deductible to the business and 100% deductible to the client.

It’s best to capture this information on the back of the receipt when you are at the restaurant making it easier to record when you get back to the office.
Be sure you have set up two separate “buckets” or accounts to make the end of year reporting easier. You can do this by setting up two meal expense
accounts in your accounting software or books -

Meals – 50% deductible
Meals – 100% deductible

If you are using our tools we have already set up these accounts for you. If not, you can easily set them up in many accounting tools and then code the expense to the proper account when you enter it in your accounting program (We suggest Quicken). Then it’s all makes the reporting at the end of the year a breeze for your tax preparer with no additional work!

Considering a home meal delivery service? These services prepare meals for you and then ship them to your home weekly.

All you do is store the meals in your fridge or freezer until you need them. Then when you’re ready – just heat and eat.

There are many different types of meal home delivery. You can get gourmet meal delivery, weight loss meals, low sodium meals, low fat meals, Zone compliant meals, vegetarian meals, diabetic friendly meals and more.

You can choose meals by occasion like a special date, birthday, new baby or holiday meal. You can even send gourmet meals as a unique gift to a friend or business colleague.

Meal delivery is exploding in popularity as people realize that it can save them both time and money. Here are a some of the ways a meal delivery service can help you:

1) Save Time – When you have meals prepared and shipped to you, you save a lot of time. There’s no shopping for groceries, washing ingredients, preparing the meals. Plus there’s minimal cleanup afterwards.

Plus, depending on if you’re using a microwave or conventional oven, it can take from 5 to 30 minutes to heat your food – so it’s ready very fast.

According to some services you can save 10-15 hours per week just on food preparation alone. The time you save can then be spent on more important things like your family, career or hobbies.

2) Save Money – Most people think meal delivery is expensive. But actually it’s not. And in fact, it can save you money.

How? Because these services can buy food in bulk and get huge discounts. They’re experts in knowing exactly what they need to buy and what they don’t. These savings get passed on to you.

There are some diet food delivery services for example that come in around $3 a meal. Other services cost around $15 a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner – which is less than most people spend on food per day. You can even find gourmet food delivery services that run around $25 a day which is still less than you’d spend on a typical restaurant meal.

There’s also another way you save money. You save on groceries – because you’re not stuck throwing out food that has gone bad in your fridge.

3) Get Healthy Food For Your Family – This is a big one. With childhood obesity rates skyrocketing, many families are looking for healthier alternatives to fast food meals.

But what can you do if you work full time? There are meal delivery services that will prepare complete, healthy, nutrient-balanced meals for you.

So you can make sure the kids are getting proper nutrition without the excess calories and preservatives found in prepared or fast foods. Plus when there’s dinner ready and on the table, kids are less likely to snack on junk foods out of hunger.

4) Send a Gift That Stands Out- If you’re looking to avoid the standard box of chocolates or flowers and send a gift that really stands out, you can send a gourmet meal to someone special.

There are delivery services that have special themed chef-prepared meals that you can choose to send to someone else. Themes include Birthday meals, New Baby meals, Thank You meals, Congratulations meals, Meals for Her and Meals for Him.

This is also a much more personal gift to send to someone if you can’t be there on their special occasion like Mother’s Day, the holidays or a birthday.

5) Look Like A Gourmet In Front of Your Friends or Significant Other – Ok, so you’re not the best cook in the world – I can relate. But you want to entertain in style. Or you really want to impress that special someone.

So what do you do? You can actually get gourmet chef-prepared meals delivered to your home before the big day.

You can order anything from a Romantic Italian feast to a Marine Shore Clambake with live Lobsters. And with detailed heating instructions on the package, even the worst cook can look like a gourmet chef.

6) Great For Ill or Recovering Patients – Many people find that meal delivery is a God-send if they are ill or recovering from surgery. It takes very little effort to just heat a meal up in the microwave of oven.

You don’t even have to leave the house – which is a great way to take care of yourself if you’re sick. And ordering from a service that prepares healthy, nutrient balanced meals can even speed your recovery time.

So those are some of the ways a meal delivery service can help you save time and money. The most time you’ll spend with meal delivery is trying to decide which service to choose and finding all of your available options. There are lots of different services out there so take your time deciding which one is right for you.

But overall, if you’re looking for a convenient way to eat healthy, gourmet meals even on a budget, meal home delivery may be the perfect solution.