Please do- because I've found anything vegan related requires more planning than any other kind of diet. Regular vegetarianism is much easier to achieve.
I was vegetarian for a long time before I went vegan 5 1/2 years ago, and it was probably a tougher transition at first than going from a meat eater to a vegetarian.
There are a lot of good tools out there now that weren't there just a few years ago. This book, which I just got and am still learning from, is a good one on how to make sure you're eating right and getting what you need to be in good health.
Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to Be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet: Jack Norris, Virginia Messina: 9780738214931: Amazon.com: Books
As to cost, here's my thoughts off hand. There's a few reasons I've encountered why being vegan can be more expensive than eating meat. One is the lack of quick, low cost, readily available meals out. There's a lot of ads for extremely cheap burgers and sandwiches at fast food places, but if you want a vegan meal, you've typically been stuck with a $5 or more sub sandwich as opposed to a $1.oo burger. Likely, you're getting fewer calories with the veggie sandwich than with the burger too, so if you are looking at price per calorie, it's not a great deal.
A few options, like Taco Bell's bean burrito (fresca style), help out a lot if you need a quick meal on the go. $0.99 around here, and enough calories to make it as a stand alone lunch. Burger King's now all have veggie burgers in the US, and if you are in many other countries, their veggie burgers are actually vegan.
At home, two things caused my food bill to go up at first...one was relying on a lot of faux meats. At the time, they were very expensive...although they seem to have held or gone down in price. Faux cheeses were even more pricey (and not very good), and there was an additional cost for me of mail ordering a lot of things I wanted to try, as grocery stores didn't have many options. There were also a lot of road trips to bigger cities to hit the Whole Foods -esque places.
Now, the local grocery store is carrying Daiya cheese, the first (in my opinion) decent vegan cheese substitute, and the price is similar to a bag of quality grated cheese.
It seems to be true across the board, vegan items are similar in price to higher end items of a similar nature....e.g. vegan burgers cost about as much as very good quality beef, vegan faux cheese is comparable with the more expensive dairy cheese slices, etc. There's still no vegan analog for the giant bags of frozen burgers or large packages of American cheese food slices as far as price goes.
The best approach, though, is to use faux products only sparingly, which gets easier when you have been vegan for a while. I've moved towards more beans and greens, both for health and cost reasons. The more I'm willing to cook and prepare, the less I have to spend.
Investing in a juicer is probably a cost saver in the long run too.
More later, now better get back to work.
