best planner for budget and meal planning

BEST PLANNER FOR BUDGET AND MEAL PLANNING HOW TO
BEST PLANNER FOR BUDGET AND MEAL PLANNING PLUS

If there’s more than one store in your area, compare them to find the best deals. Thoroughly check out the sales flyer for your grocery store. That’s one of the keys to meal planning on a budget! Step 6: Look at the grocery store’s sales ad I bet there’s several meals you can make based on what you already have on hand. You can use your list of meal ideas as inspiration, but more importantly, try to come up with meals based on your inventory. Using the This Week’s Menu Brainstorm worksheet, start jotting down breakfast, lunch, and dinner ideas. Step 5: Come up with meals you can make based on your inventory If you have dinner plans one night, or know you’ll be sitting at your kids’ baseball tournament all day Saturday, adapt your meal plan accordingly. Be realistic about how much time and energy you’ll have. Take a look at your calendar for the week, and count how often you’ll be eating at home.įigure out how many nights you’ll actually be able to cook something. Step 4: Figure out how many meals you’ll need to shop for It also includes a ‘this week’s inventory’ worksheet where you can jot down what you plan to use up that week. The Meal Planning on a Budget system has pretty printables to keep track of what’s in your pantry, fridge, and freezer. Now that you have those first 2 steps completed (you only have to do them once!), it’s time to take a look at what food you already have at home.

BEST PLANNER FOR BUDGET AND MEAL PLANNING PLUS

Plus it comes with over 100 meal ideas and 50 side dish ideas included! The cute meal idea templates in the planner are broken down by category to help with your brainstorming process.

To make meal planning go as quickly as possible, you’ll need a list of your household’s favorite meals. Or you can use the worksheets in the planner to determine what your budget should be. Sure, you can pluck a number out of thin air. In order to stay within your budget, you need to figure out how much you should actually spend. Okay, let’s check out how simple it is! Step 1: Figure out your grocery budget It’s totally flexible, and customizable to what your household actually likes to eat. No one is going to make you eat or cook anything you don’t want to. Please don’t think that ‘meal planning’ is some complicated endeavor.

BEST PLANNER FOR BUDGET AND MEAL PLANNING HOW TO

You’ll learn how to buy what you’ll eat, and eat what you buy. No more wandering up and down the aisles, tossing in whatever looks good, only to later realize that none of it adds up to a real meal.īy using the meal planner I created, along with the tricks in this post, you’ll know how to plan your meals easily, all while sticking to a budget. When it comes to doing your weekly grocery shopping, having your menu planned means you’ll know just what to buy. You won’t have to run out and pick up overpriced food because you don’t have enough groceries at home to pack lunch or make dinner. First and foremost, meal planning offers you the opportunity to be prepared.Īnd being prepared always saves you money. Yes, yes, and yes! For a variety of reasons. To walk you (and me) through the process, I created a cute vintage-kitchen style planner!Ĭause there’s no reason that functional things can’t also be pretty!Ĭheck out the Meal Planning on a Budget Planner here, and keep reading to find out exactly how to use it. In fact, this is the exact system I’ve used for years, to keep our grocery budget at $200 a month.

I decided to create a system for eating and meal planning on a budget. The groceries I bought would go to waste, and we were spending 3-4 times more than we needed to on food. Then we’d end up ordering pizza, or running out for fast food. Which meant that when dinnertime rolled around, I felt clueless, fumbling for an idea of what to make. See, I used to spend over $600 a month on groceries. Whatever the reason, you’ve probably wondered how do you eat on a tight budget ? Maybe you’re trying to live on one income, pay off debt, save for your future, or just stretch your paychecks. When it comes to managing your money, you may have started to realize that food is one of your biggest expenses.

Best planner for budget and meal planning