Meal Planning

18 Ways to Save Money on Groceries

Wouldn’t it be great if you could slash your grocery bill? We’ve been living on a pretty tight budget for almost 2 years now and I can assure you I am excellent at getting the most nutrition for my money. The stores in our area don’t offer a double coupons and rarely have sales, so we really have to work at it to find ways to save money on groceries. These 18 tips are the key to stretching your dollar and maximizing your food budget.

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Get the Most Nutrition for your Dollar | 18 Ways to Save Money on Groceries

Plan ahead. Make a meal plan and stick to it, otherwise you’ll find yourself throwing out food throwing out uneaten food. Throwing out food is like throwing out your money!
Make a list before heading to the grocery store. And again, the key is to stick to it! A list keeps you from making impulse buys and extra trips to the store for forgotten items. Not sure what to put on the list? They actually make pre-printed lists so you can just check the items you’ll need!
Check unit prices. This helps you compare brands and find the one that gives you the most product for your dollar.
Consider buying the product in bulk. Some stores sell spices, grains and pastas in bulk bins at a much lower price than they are in the brand packaging.
Buy Generic! People pay much more for the brands they trust, when there’s hardly any difference in quality or taste. You’re just paying for the name on the label!
Save yourself some time and stretch out those groceries by making a double-sized meal once a week and freezing the leftovers or using them another night.
Don’t go to the store hungry. You’re more likely to fall prey to impulse buys when your tummy is growling. The same goes for any children you bring along. We actually bring snacks and drinks on long store trips to keep the littles from getting grouchy.
Check supplies before going to the store. Use a pantry or freezer inventory to keep track of what you have on hand.
Avoid the cost of convenience. Single-serving packages for things like baby carrots, yogurt and cracker packs. Buy a large container instead and make your own snack sizes.
When produce is in season in season, buy fresh. When not in season consider canned, dried or frozen.
Buy day-old bread. Use this storefinder, and also check your local Big Lots and Dollar Tree as they are official day-old stores for Bob’s Red Mill and Bimbo.
Choose whole-grain cereals instead of the sugar-coated ones. The whole-grain are better for your and usually cost less!
Serve popcorn as a snack in place of processed crackers. Popcorn is cheaper per unit ounce than a box of snack crackers, and it’s healthier than the salty processed snacks.
Make your meat dishes go farther by adding in beans, lentils, rice, or pasta.
One night a week serve a vegetarian bean or egg dish for dinner.
Chop up overly-ripe fruits to use in smoothies or add them to yogurt or oatmeal.
Check the bottoms of packages of fruits and vegetables to make sure they’re not damaged or moldy. Also, check the expiration date on bagged salads to make sure you’ll use them before they go bad.
Make small compromises as a family, like buying one less bag of chips, crackers or cookies a week.

I’m a busy working mom of four and I’ve tried every penny-pinching trick in the book. These are real things that I really do because I don’t have time to read every grocery store mailer and visit five different stores to get the best deal. If you’re really wanting to save money on groceries, you can do it! It just takes dedication. If you’re not budgeting, get my free budget plan here and start being accountable for your spending!

Got any great tips for feeding your family on a budget? Tell me what works for you!

December Weekly Dinner Menu | Week 1

Especially during the Holidays, we try and stick to a dinner meal plan. I hate spending money on fast food when we could be spending it on gifts. Let’s stay on track of meal planning together!

December Weekly Dinner Menu: Week 1

This week we’re getting our Christmas tree over the weekend-YAY! That, combined with a “Breakfast with Santa” event and the town Christmas parade, made this weekend pretty busy for us. I’m hoping to have a night off of cooking near the end of the week so I can catch up on housekeeping. Hello, leftovers! 🙂

Sunday: Easy Chicken Alfredo Pasta Bake and steamed broccoli. I’m a sucker for pasta in a cream sauce. We’re serving ours with broccoli but you can use whatever veggies you like.

Monday: Leftover Turkey Casserole. This looks like a great “comfort-food” recipe. Anyone else still have some turkey bits in the freezer from Thanksgiving?

Tuesday: Parmesan-Crusted Pork Chops, served with steamed green beans and instant rice pilaf.

Wednesday: Taco Bake served with green salad.

Thursday: Leftovers served with thin-sliced tomato and cucumber salad.

Friday: Crock Pot Bourbon Chicken served with rice and steamed zucchini. TGI Friday’s used to have this amazing selection of menu items cooked in a Jack Daniels glaze. I’m hoping that’s what we’ll get with this recipe but crock pots always take some of the flavor out so we’ll see…

Saturday: Baked Chicken with whole wheat dinner rolls and steamed veggies. I’m not sure what veggies we’ll have that will still be good at this point, but I’m thinking it will probably be broccoli. We get a big pack of bakery whole wheat rolls at the store and freeze them for when we don’t want to cook another side dish for dinner, so that’s what we’ll be using here. My aunt has a fantastic recipe for dinner rolls that she just whips up, no big deal. My goal is to one day do the same, but that will probably have to wait until I’m not working two jobs and John finishes school…

If you try any of these and want to share your thoughts, or if you found this weekly dinner menu helpful, I’d love to know your thoughts. Share any input in the comment section below!

Family-Friendly Weekly Meal Plans

At the end of every week I take an hour or so and plan out our dinners for the following week. I try and get the weekly meal plans done by Friday night so we can do the shopping in one big trip on Saturday. I’m sharing some of the dinners we have on the menu each week so you can use them in your weekly meal planning.

Why use weekly meal plans?

Most people don’t plan their dinners for the week because it’s a pretty time-consuming process. But I promise it pays off in the long run because you save money by not eating out. It also saves time during the week if you’ve already done the grocery shopping and don’t need to make a trip to the store before you can make dinner.

I’m sharing our dinner ideas in a series of family-friendly weekly meal plans. If you’re feeding a crowd like we are (we have 2 adults, a teenager, two preschoolers and a toddler with a tremendous appetite), you should be able to find something that works for your family in these recipes.

Hopefully by sharing with you what we’re eating this week, I can save you some time in hunting for good dinner ideas.

When putting together your weekly meal plans, keep in mind your own family size and what they will and will not eat. If a recipe calls for green onions but your children don’t like them, then leave them out. Most (if not all) of our family dinners are mild because none of my kids can handle spicy food.

Family-Friendly Weekly Meal Plans | Dinner Ideas for December

Week 1

Enjoy!

Organize your Meal Planning like a Pro

Meal planning and prep. What used to be a mom-only household duty has over the last year or so morphed into something that my husband and I do together. Not that we are both in the kitchen at the same time, because that would be awesome. Since there is usually only one of us at home at a time, we’ve come up with some systems to make it easier on us to get a home-cooked meal on the table every night. Because we do eat at home every night. I’m sharing my meal planning tips with you because this is how we manage to make our lives easier. And anything that makes things easier for me just might help one of you!

This comes from a strategy I use in planning my lessons called backwards mapping. To do it, you look ahead at what needs to be accomplished and plan in a sequential manner to successfully meet your end goal. In this case, the end goal is to have everything on hand for making dinner in a timely manner.

Check everyone’s calendars. Our family stays organized using Google calendar, but apps like the Cozi Family Organizer are also great for managing the schedules of busy families (available on iTunes or Android). Our Google calendar has Logan’s baseball games and practices, John’s work schedule, my part-time job schedule, parties, any after-hours work meetings, and dinners for the week (everyone is on their own for lunch and breakfast). I like using Google calendar because it keeps all of our information in one place and it’s free. Free is always good. 🙂

Check the weather. I know this sounds kind of silly, and it’s definitely not a critical step to the meal planning process. We live in Southern California, where some days are really hot. I don’t want to have a meal scheduled on a hot day that would have the oven going all afternoon. And you never know, it might rain (wishful thinking?). If we ever do have a rainy day, that would be a really good day to have a soup planned.
Plan one or two big meals so we can have a leftovers night. Right now Thursdays are my hard day so I like to schedule leftovers for Thursday nights. That way when I get home from work I can spend quality time with my kids and not have to worry about cooking.
Keep track of your favorites. I used to use a binder that held all my weekly meal plans. You can find a link to my meal planning template here. I would save all my meal plans and highlight our favorite meals. I also had a system for color-coding the meals to help me remember what type of meal they were. My go-to meals are either quick and easy, for the crockpot, or pumped-up healthy. I’ve gone greener over the last few years and now I keep track of our favorites in Google calendar.
Make a weekly shopping trip. This helps with staying within your budget, too! We do our grocery shopping for the week on Saturday or Sunday morning, and that way I rarely have to stop for stop for groceries on the way home from work.
Use a shopping list app. This has been our lifesaver. My husband and I both have access to our shopping list using the app Out of Milk. As John or I come up with the weekly meal plan, we type the recipe name into our Google calendar and open up another tab on the computer to add the recipe ingredients into outofmilk.com, which syncs with our apps and-Voila! Everything we need is in the cloud and accessible through our smart phones.

Meal planning has been a lifesaver for us as a family of busy parents. Any night of the week I know I’ll have all the ingredients on hand for a family dinner. With that taken care of, dinner prep goes much more smoothly than when we try to just come up with something from the contents of the pantry.

Do you meal plan? How do you keep your planning organized?

Meal Planning Template

Do you make weekly meal plans for your family? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a meal planning template to keep track of all your recipes for the week? And how much easier would it be if that template was editable so you can just copy and paste from your favorite websites? Well, lovely readers, no matter your preference, I’ve got you covered.

Here you go- 3 options for a meal planning template!

Black and white Meal Planning Template

for the printer-ink-conscious chef

Color Meal Planning Template

for the chef who likes things pretty

And also a .pdf Template (Editable)!

this template is great for chefs who find recipes online. You can just type right into it, copying and pasting the link for your recipe and keeping everything organized in one spot!

We all know that meal planning is a great way to stick to a grocery budget and to keep good food on the table. I hope these templates help you to get your family on the road to healthy eating at home! Just click the link for the meal planning template of your choice, save it to your computer, and you’re all set! Or right-click the image, and select “save image as…”, and save it to your computer!

If there are any changes I could make that would make these templates more effective, please let me know in the comments.

Free Printable Calendar Template

Hi, and thanks for stopping by! Just for you, I’m sharing a printable calendar template that I recently created.

This calendar thing began because I’m at a new job and it is turning out to be a MAJOR hassle to stay on top of deadlines and such. Of course, I could have just printed out a boring ol’ table to keep track of dates, but instead I slapped together a “more pleasing to the eye” calendar, complete with cute font!
Some links may be affiliate.

There are 4 templates included in the download:

Black and white printable calendar template
Color printable calendar template
Black and white calendar template with editable month, date, and notes section
Color calendar template with editable month, date, and notes section

Here is a preview of the free printable calendar template options

Weekly Meal Planning

Even before twins, I relied on a weekly dinner menu to help keep evening meal prep a smooth-running, stress free process. It was an idea I got from a coworker, who planned out her evening meals ahead of time and did all her shopping in one day over the weekend. This works really well for families of picky eaters or with diet restrictions. When you are running kids from daycare, to and from practice, and squeezing in homework and nursing, you really have to know ahead of time what will be on the dinner table.

Before babies I used to also plan out my personal meals for the week-breakfast, snack, and lunch. This helped me to stay on track with my weight loss and fitness goals.

Here’s how I do my meal planning:

On Sunday I start by going over the coupon section of the local paper and the local grocery ads. I look for what is on special and go from there when choosing my meals. Occasionally I just choose meals that I would enjoy cooking, but not often. Most of the time I choose meals based on what we can get cheaply and what we have on hand already.
I look at the calendar of events that the family has for the week. Is hubby going to be out of town one night? If so, I can make a smaller (maybe even vegetarian!) meal while he’s gone. Does my big boy have a practice one night? Do I have a committee meeting after work? I’m going to want to either have a crock pot meal, leftovers, or a quick and easy dinner for these days.
All that’s left is to find the meals and write the ingredients into my grocery list. I keep all my meal plans in a binder, so sometimes I look back through and use the meals that turned out well or that the guys really enjoyed.
I try not to have to go to more than two stores. I live in a small town. Since we only shop once a week, we drive about 20 minutes to a discount price store, Winco (located in some areas of western states). We definitely save money by driving a little farther because our in-town grocery stores are much more expensive. Alternatively, you could see if the local Food 4 Less or Aldi’s suit your needs.

That’s it! It doesn’t really take long, and it saves a bunch of time and money in the long run. Do you do a weekly meal plan? Share in the comments!