I consider myself a fairly frugal person, except when it comes to the grocery bill. I pay pretty close attention to my family’s budget, and the one category that has always bothered me is our food bill. Not eating out, but the grocery bill. We’re a small family, but you’d think we feed a family of ten as much as we spend on groceries!
So when a friend taught me how to do meal planning, I knew this would be the answer to our outrageous grocery bill.
Meal planning has many benefits, but the greatest one to me is the money we can save on food each month. By doing meal planning, I know exactly what I need to buy at the grocery store, and I don’t waste time or money buying things we won’t eat. Before I started planning our menu a week ahead of time, we wasted a lot of food because we never got around to eating it. I also go to the store much less now, and when I do go, I don’t make silly impulse purchases. So for me, the money we save on groceries each month is worth far more than the time it takes to plan our meals each week.
The next advantage to weekly menu planning is the time it saves you. First, because you spend less time figuring out what to cook for dinner (or surfing the web for ideas). Second, since you already have everything you need to cook dinner (for the whole week!) you won’t have to run by the store after picking the kids up or on your way from work. Imagine how much time you’ll save just from eliminating daily trips to the store. If you’re like me and go to the store several times a week, you could save a couple of hours of time just by planning your meals ahead of time.
Another huge benefit you get from weekly menu planning is that it helps you eat healthier. People who do meal planning tend to eat better because they go out to eat less often. By eating out less often, you cut out a lot of the fatty foods that you would normally eat at fast food restaurants. Also, when you cook at home, you’re more likely to select fresh, healthy ingredients for your meals.
So now that you can see the benefits of weekly meal planning, how do you do it? Here’s a quick example of how to do meal planning:
1. Pay attention to your family’s favorite dishes and start writing them down. This will be a huge life saver when you can’t think of anything for dinner. By having a recipe book or computer file with your family’s favorites listed, you can come up with dinner ideas in a snap.
2. Next, grab your favorite grocery store’s sale ads for the week. Your goal is to come up with dinner ideas from the items that are on sale that week. You also might want to stock up on items that your family uses frequently when they go on sale.
3. Take an inventory of the food you already have on hand. Do you have any perishable food that needs to be eaten right away? By planning your meals around food that you already have, you’ll spend less money at the grocery store, and you’ll waste less food.
4. Write out the meals you plan on cooking for the week (a weekly meal planner worksheet works great for this), and fill out your grocery list for the items you don’t have on hand.
5. You’re almost done! Post your menu on the fridge, cook your meals each day (or cook them ahead of time and freeze them), then enjoy the rest of your week. Your week should go much more smoothly now that you don’t have to worry about “what’s for dinner” at the end of each day.
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