Saving Money: Menu Planning 101

Since JC and I are on a mission to get out of debt ASAP, we’ve been on a pretty strict budget since getting married.  We’ve managed to reduce spending in a lot of areas and finally got our $1000 emergency fund all completed last month!  Now we get to put any and all extra money against our debts and knock them out one by one.  It feels soooo good to have some control over our finances and begin to see that light at the end of the debt tunnel! 

One of the key areas where we discovered we had to cut was our grocery budget.  We simply spent way too much on food!  So we cut it down to what we thought was a pretty fair amount, and lo and behold, we discovered another problem: our first couple months being married resulted in huge grocery bills at the beginning of the month and next to nothing left by the last week of the month.  Hello Kraft Dinner 7 nights in a row!   We knew we had to something. 

I realized that a lot of the things I bought just sat on the pantry shelf without being used, or sat in the fridge until they started to grow little green furry friends and had to be thrown out.  I had to be smarter with our money and avoid all this wasted food… because wasted food meant wasted $.  I needed a plan. 

So began my menu planning.  I made up a simple two-week menu of what I wanted to make for suppers each night, wrote down all the ingredients I needed into a shopping list.  I made sure most suppers were big enough so there were leftovers for lunches for the next day or two.  We both eat pretty basic, routine breakfasts, so I added those couple of items, along with some extra fruit and veggies, some basic sandwich makings for lunches, and voila! I had my shopping list.  I remember I did my 2-week shopping and ended cutting somewhere around $40 off what I had spent previously for the same time period.  Wow!  For us, that’s a big deal!  Now, I didn’t make every supper KD and hot dogs and ramen noodles to save bucks… I still planned food that we enjoyed, like spaghetti, tacos, chicken and potatoes, stir fry, etc. 

I realized that this was our answer to saving money – meal planning!!!  Since my first 2-week plan worked so well, I decided to go big and make the next one up for an entire month.  I used my totally amazing Microsoft Word formatting skills and made up a mind-blowing super awesome calendar that I could edit each month with whatever I wanted to make for meals, including a complete grocery list and recipes.  (Yes, I am that awesome!)    :P   I ended up making four grocery lists for that entire month.  The first one was a big list where I buy all of the non-perishable or “slowly-perishable” (like cheese, bags of carrots, etc) stuff for the month.  I divided up the rest of the perishable foods into weekly shopping lists. 

It took me about 5 hours that first month to get all the meals in the calendar and figure out grocery lists and recipes, which was a long time and a lot of work!  But it paid off.  Once again we saved lots of $, managed to eat yummy food, stayed on budget and avoided wasting food.

Each month I get a bit faster and a bit more creative with my menu plan.  Last month it only took me about 3 hours from start to finish, and that included pouring through my cook books searching for new ideas.  This month it was about 2.5 hours.  And the cool part is that I enjoy it!  I find cooking to be therapeutic and relaxing, and that includes looking through cookbooks and doing my menu-plan. 

Another great side-effect of doing a meal plan is that all I have to do is glance at my calendar that’s stuck to the side of the fridge and I know exactly what to cook for supper.   No more “honey, what do you want for supper?” “I don’t know… whatever you want” “Well, I don’t know what I’m hungry for.  What are you hungry for?” “Whatever you want is fine with me” and on and on.  It makes things a lot more streamlined in the evening, because I hated getting home from work at 5:45 and then having to figure out what to make and hope we had all of the ingredients so I didn’t have to run to Sobeys yet…   I’ve also tried to plan several Crock Pot meals every month, just because it’s such a time saver to just throw a bunch of stuff in the Crock Pot, turn it on low, and know that when I come home supper will be done!

Since this saved us a lot of money and frustration, I thought some of you out there in blog-reader land might benefit from it too!  I love the organization this provides.  I never have to guess about groceries or meals or what I have or need.  It’s all done and ready when I need it. 

This is what February’s Calendar looks like: