If you live a busy life, it can be easy to fall into the trap of picking fast food up on the way home. You don’t need to.

Premade meals offer a great middle-ground between having to come home and cook every day or picking up expensive and nutritionally dubious meals on the way home from the office. And the advantages are more encompassing than they may appear at first.

Economy

Being smartly frugal requires that you be conscious about all of the resources you use in your life. Premade meals will save you money, but they’ll save you more than that. There’s a good chance you’ve gone shopping just to get caught up in a busy week and see a huge portion of what you bought go bad before you could use it.

Premade meals allow you to be economical with your time too. Instead of sitting at a restaurant waiting for your order to be taken and your meal to be both prepared and served, you can pop your meal in the oven and just go about your night.

And the money you’ll save goes beyond the most readily apparent price tag too. Even if you don’t have to throw out a whole trip’s worth of groceries, chances are that everything in your refrigerator isn’t getting used.

With premade meals in the freezer or fridge, you know what you’ll always have something on deck without having to worry about a looming expiration date, and there will be less worry about food waste – particularly if there are just one or two people in your house.

Consistency

One of the best things about a frozen premade is that you know what you’ll get. It can be hard to suss out what the nutritional content is when you order food from many restaurants, and that’s also true if you don’t follow recipes for home cooking step by step. Frozen meals provide a phenomenal means for portion tracking and calorie counting – and that can be a valuable asset even if you aren’t trying to lose weight.

If you are looking to diet, premade meals can provide a pretty solid remedy. These pre-made and portioned selections can serve as the baseline for your diet, and that provides you with the opportunity to shop smarter when looking for snacks. Going with premade meals makes it easy to keep your fridge neatly organized, and that makes it easy to keep your diet on track. With less loose food in the fridge, there’s a lower less of temptation as well.

Variety

Do you have the ingredients in your kitchen to make an Indian curry? What about authentic barbacoa or a lobster roll? Being able to cook up whatever cuisine you think of would require a big kitchen, a deep wallet, and a whole lot of culinary skills. Fortunately, there are prepared meal delivery services that come with all three.

With the ability to pick from a large and changing menu, meal delivery services can provide what’s essentially a global culinary cruise. And since most of these services offer a decent amount of flexibility in what you order, you have a lot of range to experiment.

Want to stock up on some comfort food so you have something to fall back on if you end up hating that exotic dish you want to try? You can absolutely do that with fresh meal deliveries.

Meal delivery services come with a cost, but that overhead can deceptively seem higher than it actually is. If you’re on the fence about a meal delivery service, take the time to investigate. Look at your budget, consider what amount of your time, energy, and money your current dinner routine involves, and then compare it to the alternative. You might be surprised by how much you could really save with a meal delivery service.