SCALING BACK YOUR GROCERY BILL BY MENU PLANNING
I am an avid supporter of menu planning. I even wrote an article on menu planning over a year ago. For 2010 I have decided to do a year long series of getting “frugally fit.” 2010 is going to be a year where a lot of families will need to tighten their budget. It is my goal, here at Penny Pinching Diva, to provide you with tips throughout the year to help you stretch your money.
Grocery Shopping.
Hearing these two words together can cause any person to cringe. In some families the grocery bill can amount to be just as much as a rent or mortgage payment depending on the size of the family. What use to be a daunting, and pocket emptying, task can now be turned into yet another way for you to save your family money this year.
FIRST THING FIRST – MENU PLANNING
The first step in saving money on your grocery bill is by menu planning. By planning out your family’s meals you are not only saving yourself time in the kitchen throughout the week, but also allowing yourself to take advantage of ingredients you may already have in your pantry or cabinets.
Menu planning can be done weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. (I plan my meals on a week-by-week basis.) Once you have taken inventory of what’s in your cabinets you can sit down and begin planning out your family’s meals. On your menu plan you will need to map out what you will prepare for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day of the week.
Once you have completed your menu plan, you’ll need to create your grocery list. Creating your grocery list will take place in two different steps.
Step 1. Rough Draft Grocery List
This is the grocery list that will include every ingredient/food item that you will need in order to make all of your meals for the week. After you have made out your list you will now go through your pantry and cabinets and cross off of your list all of the items that you already have in stock.
Step 2. Final Grocery List (aka Master Grocery List)
After you have fine tuned your first grocery list, you’ll begin creating your master grocery list for the week. On your grocery list you’ll need to leave space to indicate whether or not you have a coupon for that particular item and what store you’ll be purchasing each item at. (I use highlighters to mark each of the different stores. For example pink is for Winn Dixie and blue is for Wal-Mart.)
Once you have your master grocery list you will conduct your grocery shopping like normal. Make sure that you double check online at your favorite savings blogs to see if your local grocery stores are carrying any good deals. You can also sit down with your weekly circulars and double check them as well.
If you have any produce or fruit on your grocery shopping list, make sure you pay a visit to your local farmer’s market. I have found a lot of great deals on fresh, organic produce at several of the farmer’s markets in my area. I believe in supporting local businesses and it is “usual” that the produce at a farmer’s market can be priced 15% to 50% cheaper then what you will find at your local grocery stores. A lot of the smaller farms cannot afford to go through the process of getting organically certified through the FDA but they still practice organic farming methods. Politely ask and they will be more than happy to tell you their farming practices.
AN EXTRA MENU PLANNING TIP
Try keeping a Master Menu Planning file somewhere in your home. I have eight weeks worth of menu plans (8 individual plans) and their corresponding grocery list stored on my computer. On weeks where my time is limited I will print out a menu plan and it’s coinciding grocery list and save about an hours worth of planning time. If you want to save paper and printer ink, print off your menu plan and it’s master grocery list containing all of the ingredients and place them inside page protectors.
Here are some great links to other menu planning resources and tips:
Do you menu plan? How has menu planning saved you money? Do you have any menu planning tips to share?
Grocery Basket photo credit to qmnonic | Farmer’s Market photo credit to NatalieMaynor
Kat @ For the Love of Chaos (51)
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Kenesha Causey (16)
Thanks so much for linking to my post, Shynea! Your article and the other resources you included are very helpful. Even though I have been menu planning for quite a while now, it is still somewhat of a challenge. For some reason I put so much pressure on myself to come up with a different menu for each week, and I tend to draw a blank when it’s time to sit down and determine the menu. It is SO helpful when my hubby weighs in and tells me what he’d like to eat, but usually he just says “whatever”
I think I need to get a little more organized and put together that recipe binder I talked about in my post. I think it would help me remember the easy recipes that we like instead of reinventing the wheel every week.
I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to do exactly this! I even went so far as to write on our family calendar the dinner for each day. I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I fail every time. As if it’s any easier to go running to the grocery store every single day?
Funny! I feel like I should scream running down the street with a spatula…lol. I do plan as well weekly or bi-weekly, depending on the money flow outlook. Since Ive cut down my work schedule due to a challenging pregnancy, its been weekly. Here’s where I get stuck in planning: My hubby is the “whatever” man and my children say “just stop making nachos”, so I get a lot of help…right. How do you plan for a carnivorous man-child and picky children that hardly every contribute to my stress of planning for them? Im talking balanced meals on one income.
For January, I planned out the whole month for dinners, and for February we are cleaning out the pantry and freezer. I have a love/hate relationship with meal planning… it’s fun to try new recipes and browse for them, but I hate the time it takes!