Why Chest Freezers are a Great Tool to Get Rich

I read a lot of FIRE blogs on the internets. Mr. Money Mustache wrote an article way back in 2012 about “Killing your $1000 Grocery Bill.” It’s great. But I really can’t relate to his $80 per week grocery spending as a lavish lifestyle. I know, he wrote this in 2012. When adjusted for inflation to 2021 dollars, his baller grocery bill is actually about $93 per week. Man, that guy is living high on the hog. Comparatively (and thanks to Mint, I know precisely the amount we spend!), we spent $225.46 per week on groceries in 2019.* What is wrong with us? 

Well, put simply: this is not a category that we care to cut back that significantly. I could live off of rice and beans, but I enjoy cooking and eating fancy stuff. I feel justified in this spending because we almost never go out to restaurants to eat. Seriously. We ate at “restaurants” 23 times in 2019, the overwhelming majority of which were me or my wife buying lunch while at work.

Taking all of this into account, I still think we live even more lavishly than our weekly grocery bill would indicate. One big way we accomplish this is stocking up when things go on sale, especially big-ticket foods like meats. The best way to accommodate this kind of shopping is to get a chest freezer. 

Stocking Up: The Details

A chest freezer is a beautiful, practically money-printing delight to own. Just think, you can lock in whatever the sale price is on your meats, vegetables, frozen pizzas, etc., for as long as you care to store the item in your freezer. 

In our case, we eat about one fillet of Alaskan salmon every week. These fillets, which are typically $14.99/lb, go on sale every now and again at our local grocer at $8.99/lb. When this happens, I will usually buy ten or more fillets at a time. It makes my spending on groceries that week absurdly high, but over time it’s a massive savings. Salmon fillets average around 1.5 pounds. That means for the ten fillets I purchase (which in turn last us about ten weeks), I pay $134.85 before tax. Had I paid full price because I didn’t have the space to store the fillets, I would be paying $224.85, a difference of $90! 

That means that the chest freezer almost paid for itself in about two cycles of salmon purchasing. Crazy, right? It is crazy, because this wouldn’t be the case for most people. Chances are, it would take you a bit longer to break even.

Our Freezer

You see, I bought this GE chest freezer (<—NOT an affiliate link). It’s amazing—energy star certified (uses an estimated $26 of electricity per year), will operate between 0-110 degrees (though we have ours in the basement), and has held up really well over the years for us. As of this writing, its full-price MSRP is about $558, albeit from Home Depot. Strangely, the cost of these appliances varies quite a bit from month to month. 

Anywho, $558 is certainly a far cry from paying for itself with $180 like I indicated above, right? Well, first of all we bought ours on sale (duh) for $428. If there’s no immediate need to purchase an appliance, just wait for a sale—for almost every big outdoor holiday, Black Friday, etc., retailers discount appliances. Second, the freezer arrived damaged not once, but TWICE. After the first one was damaged, Lowe’s knocked $75 off the price and shipped another one. When it arrived damaged the second time (dented on its side, a purely superficial issue), they knocked another $200 off the price to encourage me to keep it. 

The final cost to us was $148.74. Kudos to Lowe’s customer service for taking this from a headache transaction to one I was thrilled about.

Since we bought this freezer three years ago, I’d estimate our food savings have been several thousands of dollars without breaking a sweat. We also frequently have at least a thousand dollars worth of stuff in the freezer,** so I wanted to figure out how well it would hold up in the event of a power outage. Turns out, if your freezer is full (dead space is the enemy!) then it will keep your food frozen for around three days. The DC-area has experienced power outages that have lasted at least that long. Luckily, I wired up a little solution to provide power from my electric car in the event of a prolonged power outage.

Pros and Cons

So why did we end up getting a chest freezer instead of an upright? There are a few reason for this. Pros:

1. First, chest freezers tend to have better insulation and higher energy efficiency than their upright counterparts. That means that if the power goes out, our food is probably OK for about 50 percent longer than if it were sitting in an upright freezer. 
2. Another benefit of a chest freezer is that it can, for practical purposes, fit more food per cubic foot than an upright freezer; most of this is based on internal organization because you never have to worry about items falling out of a chest freezer when you open the door. 
3. Lastly, chest freezers usually are less expensive to buy than their upright friends.

This is not to say that chest freezers don’t have a few drawbacks to them. Cons: 

1. They take up more floor space than an upright. If you’re interested in a freezer and live in a smaller home then that is a consideration you have to weigh. 
2. The other drawback to a chest freezer is that it’s easy to lose track of what gets buried in the bottom. By contrast, uprights tend to display their contents a little easier. 

One Last Thing

The one final consideration for shopping freezers is whether to buy self-defrosting versus manual-defrosting models. We opted for a manual-defrost and have not had to constantly defrost and drain it. In fact, we only defrosted it once after three-and-a-half years of ownership—when we moved. It had accumulated about a quarter inch of frost around the interior lining in that time. Defrosting it took a total of about 30 minutes while the freezer contents sat in coolers and a spare fridge. If this sounds arduous to you, maybe spend more money to opt for the self-defrosting variety.

Whew, that was a lot of writing about a chest freezer—and maybe more than you ever wanted to read. I want to reiterate that we’ve easily saved thousands of dollars using this little appliance. Strange to think that I consider a freezer to be something that has made my life richer… oh, adulthood.

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*I couldn’t use our 2020 grocery spend because my brother and I split the grocery shopping for my parents during COVID so that they didn’t have to be exposed to going to the grocery store. That would have skewed our spending way higher.

**Even more if you consider the times it had breast milk stored in it. For all you breast-feeding mommies and their partners out there, you know this stuff is liquid gold!