How To Meal Plan To Save Money

Meal planning is essential when you need to save money, especially if you want to feed your family well and with real food. This Meal plan technique might be slightly different than your average meal planner.

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At The Homemaker’s Way we like to make sure we are eating as much God food as possible and not as much Man food. God food is food that comes from plants and animals and not in a lab and filled with lots of chemicals. This means we eat what’s in season more often and grow or produce our own food, or source it locally. This will greatly effect how We meal plan.

Why Should You Meal Plan

There’s many reasons why you should meal plan and many of them are health and wellness related. Rather it’s for physical health or meatal health meal planning can help. Hears a few of my favorite benefits of making a meal plan.

Saves Money
Clears brain space
Never have to wonder what’s for dinner
Saves time
Improves your nutrition by making better choices and having higher quality food.

How to Meal Plan For Real Food

There’s many different ways you can customize this meal plan. You can decide to only meal plan out dinners or you can plan breakfast, lunch, dinner AND snacks! It’s totally up to you. The next thing you can do is meal plan for a week or a month. I recommend 1-2 weeks so its not so over whelming.

When my husband worked at his old job he got paid biweekly and had every other Wednesday off so we would grocery shop on that day and shop for 2 weeks of groceries. Now he gets paid weekly and so we grocery shop almost every weekend for one weeks worth of food but often times I still have enough to get us through at least half the next week.

Plan out your week

First you need to plan out your week or however many days you will be meal planning for. Figure out what you will be doing the following days and set your shopping day up as well. Here is where you will find out what types of meals you will need for the week.

Quick example of planning meals around your week

Monday you have some time so you can try something new. Wednesday you might be out late for church so that will need to be a quick dinner night or something you can take on the road. We like to have pizza night at my house on Friday. If there’s a day you eat out or have date nights you add that in. Add in snacks and breakfasts and lunches and maybe 1 or 2 quick in case of emergency meals. With all this food you’ll likely have one day where you can eat leftovers, nd you should be set for the week. I like to roughly plan out snacks and breakfasts and Lunch is usually really simple or leftovers.

Do to the nature of being busy and plans changing all the time, this meal plan is not set in stone. There’s plenty of wiggle room to change things around if need to be. This is great when you have something randomly come up and you need a quick dinner or maybe you didn’t realize how much that recipe actually mad so you have a ton of left overs.

Check what you have

The first step in the actual meal planning process is knowing what you have. If you are a gardener you will obviously check what you have coming in and what you have an abundance of. You will then check your fridge, freezer and pantry for things that need to be used up or that you can make a meal with.

Note if you have any fruit or veggies going bad. If you have soft veggies like carrots and celery, you can use them in homemade broth or other soups. Don’t throw out those brown bananas! Use them to make banana bread or freeze for smoothies.

Check Sales and Deals

This is an optional extra step. Few places actually do good sales and coupons now days, but if have a favorite place to shop that does them check it out! Also If you have something like Wic you can use that to your advantage at places that do “Buy this Get That” deals.

Pick the Meals For Your Meal Plan

Now that you know what your week is going to look like and what you already have at home, it’s time to actually choose the meals. Pick a few favorites and whatever fits your family, and if you are feeling adventurous throw in a new recipe to try. Get out your favorite cook books and use Pinterest or your favorite blogs and any of your other favorite sources for recipes. I like to choose meals that use up ingredients from other meals.

Why should you plan meals that use many of the same ingredients?

Planning meals that use up some of the same ingredients will actually save you money and produce less waste. For example you can roast a whole chicken for dinner with some veggies. In stead of throwing the carcass away or eating the same meal twice, you can repurpose it. Put the carcass with or without a few veggies in an instant pot and cover with water to make delicious healthy bone broth. (If you don’t have an instant pot, you can do it on the stove in a stockpot or in a slow cooker). Then you can use the pulled chicken for soups along with the stock you just made. This will help stretch your meat even further!

Another example is with veggies. Many of the same vegetables can go in many different meals so you can use up every last bit and nothing goes to waste. And if you find you still bought way to much you can eat them raw as a snack or if they got too soft into the stock they go!

Make Your meal Plan Shopping List

Go threw every meal or snack and right down the recipe or items for each.
Put the items on a list with combined amounts of each item. Ex. If you need 2 pounds of potatoes from one meal and 3 pounds for another then get a 5 pound bag.
Check off everything you already have at home and make final notes if needed.
If you go to multiple places for your food write down beside each item where you’d like to get it from.

Go Shopping

Now its time to go shopping! Here’s a few tips I like to use when grocery shopping.

How to save money grocery shopping

Try to make convivence food from scratch to save money
Make homemade bread for a healthy alternative that is way cheaper
Instead of buying prechopped or prepared foods buy them whole and wash and chop when you get home.
- Instead of baby carrots, buy whole carrots
- Buy fresh whole fruit instead of chopped fruit
- Buy a whole chicken instead of chicken breast
  - Chicken and other meats can be bought cheaper by purchasing them whole or with bones in and skin on. Boneless skinless chicken wings for example, although convenient, is way more expensive than buying bone in.
  - Most of the valuable nutrients is striped away as well when buying boneless and skin less.
  - If you can buy bone in anything do it! the bones are basically free collagen which is very healthy for you when turned into bone broth.
Get creative which meat cuts. My local grocery store often has pork butt roasts on a really good sale and I can turn that into ground pork with my inexpensive meat grinder.
When you find a really good deal get as much as you can afford or as much as the store allows per person. A good rule is 1 for now 2 for later.
Buy in Bulk. Often times its cheaper to by in bulk.
Buy store brand when you can. Most of the time its the same product with a different label on it.
Look at the price per unit. Sometimes the name brand or the small quantity is actually cheaper than store brand or bulk! It may not seem like that big of a difference, but over time it can add up.
If you have Wic benefits you can often use it to you advantage as I stated earlier.
Some farmers markets also except Wic and EBT so make sure to check those places out!
- Most also double up on cash, meaning you can get double the amount that you are approved for at the farmers market.