Meal Planning Tips To Save Money

Weekly meal planning has helped us to not only save money, but it also saves time as well. These meal planning tips to save money can also help save your sanity and the stress of figuring out dinner every day.

For the past two years, we have been using these strategies to plan our family’s dinners. Now we are sharing the best tips we use weekly to plan our meals and save money at the same time

The one thing we have learned about grocery shopping is that without a plan, it is easy to spend over budget. We have worked out a plan that not only keeps us within budget, but it also helps with the daily dilemma of figuring out what’s for dinner.

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Why Have A Plan?

We get asked this a lot. And many of our friends and family thought that we only had a plan because of our large family. But that wasn’t it.

Even as our kids grow and move out on their own, we are still sticking to meal planning. And the kids who have moved out, are using these same tactics to save and stay on budget every week.

Is Meal Planning Easy?

There are a few simple tricks we have that make meal planning easier. We use three simple tools to help us every week.

These tools keep us on track and make it much easier to plan meals every week.

What Tools Do We Use?

The three tools we use are:

• The Flipp App on our phones.
• A whiteboard to keep track of what’s on hand.
• A chalkboard calendar with post-it notes.

The tools we use can all be found on Amazon. This is the Calendar we use, though we bought it at Dollarama a few years ago for $5. Our whiteboardwe bought on Amazon as well.

Weekly Planning To Save Money

Every week we plan out our 7-8 meals based on the sales flyers for that week.

Why do we only plan one week at a time? Because the flyers change every week, this gives us variety in the meal planning and new ideas every week.

How Do We Keep Track Of What We Have On Hand?

We have created a system that works for us when it comes to keeping track of what’s on hand. That starts with a white board on the fridge.

A magnetic whiteboard stays on the freezer door at all times, and it is sectioned into: Fridge, Freezer, Pantry, and Spices. The sections are put there with a permanent marker so they don’t get erased.

Setting up the inventory list took about 30 minutes to create the sections and take inventory, but now we keep it updated, and it only takes minutes a week to do.

As the food is taken from the fridge or freezer, we erase it from the board. When we shop on Thursdays, we add what we buy to the list.

There is a section at the bottom where we add items we are running out of or need to buy.

The whiteboard has been one of the best things we have invested in for keeping track of what we have on hand, saving us money because we aren’t spending money on items we already have but forgot about. There are no more buying it just in case we don’t have it.

Keep The Basics On Hand

Having a well-stocked spice cupboard and some basic ingredients on hand helps make meal planning easier.

We like to keep a variety of spices and herbs on hand. But there are times when a recipe we want to make might use a spice we don’t normally use. This is when we will try to find either the smallest package we can, or we stop by Bulk Barn to buy the amount we need for that particular recipe.

We also look for substitutions for some ingredients to see if there is something in our pantry we can use instead. Recently, when wanting to make Cashew Chicken, the recipe called for Mirin, which we don’t ever have on hand. In the past, we had used Vermouth from our liquor cabinet in place of sherry. And it worked as a substitute for Mirin as well!

Shop The Flyers, Then Plan The Meal

One of the biggest mistakes people make that can cost a lot of money is planning meals then shopping the flyers. This can cost a lot because you won’t always find the ingredients on sale, and you may have to go back and plan over again.

So we start every Wednesday with the Flipp app to make our grocery list first. We find what is on sale, then plan meals around the sales.

This makes it easier to stay on budget.

The Meal Plan

Once we know what is on sale, we can create a meal plan. The plan is to have 7-8 meals we can make using what is on sale.

Why more than 7 meals for the week? We always have a backup meal or two in case we can’t get to the store the following week on Thursday. And sometimes the store may be out of a product so we have an extra meal to fall back on.

Double Up on Items That Can Be Used More Than Once

This is something we do every week: look for an item that is a good sale price and plan more than one meal around it.

When sweet peppers come on sale, we try to make a couple of meals using them, like fajitas, stir fry, or stuffed peppers.

The meats we use tend to be the one thing we buy that has to be used in more than one dish. For example, if ground beef is on sale, the meal plan can include a pasta dish, burgers, and tacos. Same meat, different meals. Add a chicken or pork meal in between the nights you have chicken.

Price Match To Save Even More

This is something we talk about a lot! Price matching not only saves us a ton of money, but it also saves us time and gas by not having to go from store to store.

To learn the tricks we use in store, check out our Money Saving Grocery Shopping Tips.

Plan Leftovers

Every week, we plan to use leftovers. It gives us a day off from cooking, and leftovers can be used as lunches.

Some weeks we take a meal off the board or move it to the next week, then replace it on the calendar with a Clean Out The Fridge Day. This is usually on a Wednesday to help get the fridge ready for the weekly shopping haul.

Leftovers can also be frozen for later. We have chili, spaghetti sauce, and homemade soup in our freezer most of the time. These come in handy when there aren’t many sales one week, or if we don’t feel like cooking a full meal.

Putting The Meal Plan Together

Once you know what meals you will be making, and your shopping is done, then it’s time to finish the plan by making the calendar.

We use a chalkboard calendar that hangs in our kitchen. Sometimes, we write the meal plan directly onto the calendar in chalk, but most times the meals are written on post-it notes.

We write down the seven meals we will make and add them to the calendar days. The reason we use Post-it notes is that they are easier to move around from one day to another.

We may have planned spaghetti one night, but decided it was going to be a great night for a BBQ meal instead. So we can easily move the spaghetti to another night and the BBQ chicken to the present. (Stacy also has a thing about Post-it notes, she has hundreds of them so this is a great way to use them up.)

Many of our Post-its are also reused from month to month. Leftovers can be moved from week to week and reused many times before they lose their stickiness.

How Much Has Weekly Meal Planning Saved

Making a weekly plan has saved us money and time. It has also saved our sanity.

Having a plan is an easy way to stick to a budget. We have a budget of $200 per week for five of us, which includes all meals and snacks. But there are weeks that we spend less than $150 on groceries for the week.

And the best we have done recently was $126 for a week’s worth of groceries. That is $25 per person for a week. That week was basically only meat with a few must-haves like bread and eggs. We used our pantry items and frozen leftover spaghetti sauce.

We know what is for dinner in advance, so we can take the meat out of the freezer the night before. There is no guessing. And we have gotten in the habit of taking out tomorrow’s dinner while we cook tonight’s dinner.

Meal planning has saved us over $1000 a year just in food waste because there is less waste when you are only buying what you need.

And having a plan saves your sanity. It takes the stress out of what’s for dinner, when you have a plan already mapped out, that is adaptable because you have everything you need on hand.

Small Changes, Big rewards

That is how we look at this whole plan. Just a few changes we made to how we shopped led to big savings and less waste.

We would love to hear from you. What are your tips for saving every week? Leave a comment below to let us know and help others save money every day.