I suppose it varies based on career and lifestyle, but I believe that most of the readers of this site, at least, feel more of a crunch on time than cash.
And, you can cook more at once. Nothing says you have to start from scratch every day of the week; in my case I often cook Sunday nights and make 2 or 3 dishes. If you read through recipes a bit, you can find ways to reuse the same preheated oven, etc.
And, home cooked meals tend to be healthier. This is a form of time saving; while pretty hard to prove unfortunately, I strongly suspect that “losing about 90 minutes” now and having a healthier life will buy years down the road.
1. You might want to see prepping, cooking and cleanup as relaxing activity that let your brain work in the background. The very same way taking a break and going out for a walk or taking a shower help you come out of a dead end.
2 - phase can be optimised or skipped altogether. Everyone comes up with their own way. For me this means taking as much advantage of my microwave oven as I can (a microwave pressure cooker really is one of the best deals I got recently).
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(32+%2F+6)+oz+of+pork+...
Also excluded: food wasted at home.
Admittedly, I'm quite lazy so I just have very easy to prepare stuff. Salads, stews and steamed or roasted fish or lamb (only twice per week).
While I once used to eat everything that's on my plate because it's a pity to waste food, I've then learnt to just stop eating when I'm full.
On one hand this alone made me lose some weight, on the other hand I can't always save excess food for the next meal (example: restaurant or delivered things like french fries and things like that).
This doesn't quite make sense to me. Although there are certainly items that don't keep particularly long, say, more than a day, I have trouble coming up with a common restaurant food that can't be saved at all, with proper refrigeration.
Fully cooked potatos, such as french fries, I've never had trouble with, and they even reheat well and easily in a convection toaster oven.
