Pre made vs Homemade

I cook for a family of 5, so I would buy all the ingredients and make it from scratch, that way it would be large enough for two dinners and I would have left over ingredients to make something else. If you are buying just for yourself than hey why not.

The big difference you'll find between premade and homemade, like Annie_01 mentioned, is the sodium content. I can only suspect that the premade filling is really high in sodium. However, that's not necessarily an awful thing either if it's the one high sodium thing you eat in the day and offset it with making sure you're drinking water.

Personally I prefer home made because it goes a lot farther than packaged. Even if you're just cooking for you it is worth it in the end to get as much as you can out of those dollars you spend by doing all your meals home made. Just prepare in advance.

As a side note, I know what it's like to eat on a strict budget... I have definitely been there. And when I cooked at home it really help, one thing that helped me even more was using flyers from all the local stores to determine where I get my groceries... I walked to each one and pick up what I needed at the lowest price. And additionally I also made meal plans that were based on the cheapest but most nutrient dense foods I could get so that I could get the most out of my bucks.

Do what works for you. If you meet your nutritional goals it doesn't matter how you get there. If you're cooking for multiple people it often works out cheaper to do from crash, but when it is just one person it is often not worth it. You would likely have way too much left overs to be worth it and you can only eat chicken pot pie so many times

Well $8 for 240g of chicken is outrageous, lol.

But I've bought premade things (like soup) because sometimes it's just too much work to make it myself (plus fresh veggies are very expensive right now). So for me time factor should definitely be considered in the price. But yeah I've bought already made guacamole because it was cheaper than buying 1 avocado.

But usually I make things from scratch. With reasonable prices for the chicken (I rarely pay over $2.69 a pound for chicken breast, and other cuts are cheaper), it would be cheaper to make it yourself too, and you'd have enough for several meals. And homemade tastes better!

I eat homemade for most meals. I costs less - i have a family of five so that would have been 25$. Never mind that, I am in Canada so it probably would have been $40.

Plus we ave food intolerances in the house that make most per packaged foods a health risk.

As far as nutrition, you can better trust anything you make at home because you can control exactly what goes into it. Sometimes it's not just calories but other added ingredients too. But if money was an issue for you in that moment and you took the time to read the nutrition and ingredients I suppose you could let it slide.

Generally the ingredients add up to getting more than one meal out of them or many servings where a pre-made item is just one meal/serving. I'd probably figure out the cost vs servings of both and compare. Usually homemade item wins.
Homemade food usually tastes better so I'd probably consider that.
Sometimes I want food I don't have to prepare or I don't have the skill/time to make it from scratch. Pre-made item wins in that case.

Something like a pot pie I would probably make to use up leftover meat and vegetables. When I was meal planning I might have had a whole chicken planned one day and then planned to use the leftovers in various dishes like this.

With five kids and a husband to feed, from scratch is the only way I can keep in budget. However, if it fits in your goals then there's no reason not to.