Can Meal Planning Really Save Money? See How!

Can you really save money Meal Planning

How many times have you gone grocery shopping and paid a ridiculous amount of money for your groceries? Only for you to get home and realize you have nothing to eat. You have enough for tonight’s dinner, a shit ton of snacks, and uncoordinated groceries you only bought because you ran out of it at home.

Exactly way too many times. I can not count the times I’ve done this and how much money I have wasted on food. Simply by not being prepared to shop.

It sounds crazy when you say, “Be prepared to shop.” But, it’s the truth you have to be prepared to shop. If you want to save money.

The easiest way to do this is to plan your meals. When some people hear this they think Meal Prep and this is not the same thing. Meal prepping is a whole different ball game. Personally, I don’t like to meal prep. Two thumbs down for me.  

What is Meal Planning

Meal planning is sitting down once a week (bi-weekly, monthly, pretty much just whenever you have time)  and deciding what you are going to have for different meals. You can decide if you want to plan for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Or just lunch and dinner or maybe only dinner. It doesn’t matter just do what works best for you. 

I only plan for dinner and buy quick easy meals to make for breakfast and lunch. This works best for me because I have 2 kids in school. My partner works nights and wakes up late in the afternoon. It’s just me and the baby during the day. I don’t really have to worry about breakfast and lunch too much. But, if I did I would most definitely plan those meals out as well.

I have no idea what will get you to want to plan your meals out, but I do have a couple benefits of meal planning that have helped me in so many ways. Just keep on reading if you want to learn how meal planning can save money. Don’t forget to sign up for Sweeten Ya’ Tea to snag your free Weekly Meal Planner Printables.

Buying only what you need to save money

This was a big one for me, oh my goodness. I would buy so much food that I thought we needed only for it to go to waste. 

Just looking through the fridge and pantry for something to make for dinner would stress me out. It was always so much food ( that I prided myself on). 

Having my dinners planned helped save money by assuring me that when I went to the store I only bought what I needed to make dinner for 1 week. It also helped me budget my weekly grocery allowance and stay within my limit.

Coordinated Meals

Because I sat down weekly to plan my meals, my meals would be coordinated. 

Let’s say I planned a meal that included shrimp. Well, I’m not just going to plan one meal with shrimp. I would plan 2 or 3 meals that included shrimp so the shrimp doesn’t sit in the freezer to be freezer burned and forgotten.

And I don’t only do this with the meat. I do this with every meal to help coordinate all the ingredients down to the veggies in each meal. I used to buy veggies every time I went grocery shopping. Try to use all these different techniques to keep them fresh for weeks only to have them wither and go super duper bad. 

Why not just buy exactly what you need for the week or so? 

Exactly….

I’m not a freaking homestead, I don’t have to preserve my food. ( Eventually, I will get into that just not right now.) I was wasting time doing busy work.

I traded the time I would take to try and preserve my veggies with sitting down and planning my meals.

Being able to coordinate my meals helped me save money by buying less groceries and stretching the groceries I bought to make multiple meals, not just one meal. Usually, we buy a whole bunch of ingredients for ONE meal. Let’s do it the other way around and save some moolah.

Not Splurging on a quick dinner

Running out the house, with a toddler on my hip, 2 hours before dinner should be done and splurging on a quick dinner. 

Happy I got to the store and back and dinner was done within 2 hours. Not happy I spent way more than I had to. 

One of these deserves a pat on the back and it’s not the latter. I found myself doing this more often than not. Not only was I wasting money on food, I was wasting money on GAS. 

Help me! 

I was beating my pockets into the ground like THEY stole something. Whole time it was me doing the stealing. 

And to think all I needed was to sit down for less than an hour a week and plan my meals to save money and time. Next up…..

No Fast Food

I don’t know if you all have been to a fast food joint lately, but to feed a family of five fast food has gone up in price a bit. 

I will say that I didn’t grow up on fast food and neither have my children, I have always been a home cooked meal lover and I love to cook. 

But, the times I do opt for eating out because I can’t think of a dinner to make or I don’t feel like cooking, or maybe I just have a taste for some seriously unhealthy good food. 

It cost way more than it would to make a meal.

Fast food fits perfectly and nicely into some people’s schedule. It works for them.

But, check this out, you can plan fast food out too, to save money. Most restaurants have apps, rewards and you probably still get snail mail with coupons. Plan your meals around it. Make it work!

Clearing out your fridge and pantry to save money

May not sound like it can save money, so to speak. Clearing out your fridge every week allows you to see exactly what it is that you need and what you already have. This eliminates buying more of something you have already.

I’m not saying your pantry and fridge have to be bone dry empty. My pantry is stocked with things and I replenish what is missing. Here’s the but, clearing it out and having a view of what actually is in there allows me to only buy what I need.

Same with the fridge and the fridge is easier to clear out now than before because if I did my shopping for the week correctly. It should be pretty much empty by the end of the week. 

Let me make this make sense…

I buy a lot of pasta so let’s say I plan to make a meal with pasta. I can go straight to my pantry and have a clear view of the pasta we already have. Now, I have 2 choices. I can either make something with the pasta we already have or I can buy pasta we ran out of and make something with that. 

And that all depends on my weekly grocery budget. 

Also, a clear pantry and fridge means everybody else in the house can also see what we have and choose what to eat. They don’t have to sort through expired food and Tupperware of leftovers we are never going to finish. 

Bonus: my partner is not buying peanut butter every time we go to the store because he can’t find it in the pantry with all the other 10 jars of peanut butter. He has a clear view of our doomsday peanut butter stockpile. Saves MONEY!

No longer wasting time

Time is money. If I’m not wasting time and thinking power everyday trying to plan a meal for dinner. I can use that time to do things like ‘Start a Blog’. 

You can use this time to be productive in other areas of your life. Meal planning gives me a minimum of 30 min per day to do other things. I’ve used that time to workout, read my bible work on my blog and so much more. 

30 minutes may not seem like a lot if you add it up over 7 days it equals 210 minutes. That is 3.5 hours minimum each week 14 hours minimum each month. I say minimum because usually if I know the meals I’m cooking for the week I can do slight preparation while making other meals. 

Like chopping all the veggies I’m going to use for the week or batch cooking the meat for the week or deciding if this meal can be cooked in a slow cooker. You get the point.

We’re not even counting the time it saves only going to the grocery store 2 times per week. Yes, 2 times a week my kids eat fruit like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle. I tried buying more and they just ate more. Cold Hard Facts. 

I end up having to take a fruit only trip midway through the week. Still not bad compared to 4-5x a week I was going.  

Saves time at the store

This deserved the last but not least spot. Because, y’all,  I’m in and I’m out with all the groceries I need for the entire week in less than an 1 ½ hour. Do you know how much I saved alone on impulse, let’s just go down this aisle too? A lot. 

I don’t spend 4-6 hours every week grocery shopping. No longer buying food we don’t eat or may waste. I also don’t buy a lot of ‘snacks’ and I don’t browse every aisle trying to find something I may cook for dinner. Just to get home and forget why I bought and what I was going to make.

This is how you save money by meal planning. 

Every purchase has a purpose; it is intentional. I speak a lot about intentionally living because it makes a huge difference in every thing you do.  

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