Meal Planning to Save Money!

Save money on groceries

One place you can save money and time at the grocery store. Everyone understands whenever you plan ahead, you are far more successful and effective. You take several minutes before shopping, you’ll save yourself a lot of time in your kitchen and a lot of money at the checkout when it comes to planning meals in advance.

Here are some easy steps you can take to prepare some meals and save some money on groceries:

1. Ask yourself what are your family’s favorite meals before you head to the grocery store. Get your cookbook or recipe binder to choose your meals. Easiest way to plan your meals is asking your family or friends for meal suggestions, so that the task doesn’t all fall on you with meal planning.

2. Have a piece of paper out for this next step. At the bottom of the paper, list the 10-16 dishes that you are able to make in the next weeks. At the very top of the piece of paper, list ingredients that you don’t have on hand as you write down a meal. When you are done, you will have a list of meals at the bottom of this paper and a list of ingredients to buy towards the top of the paper. This paper has now become your grocery shopping and meal planning list. Take this list with you to the grocery store and buy the items which are on the list.

You know that when you come home you will definitely have all the ingredients you need to make those 10-16 meals when you’ve got this list in your hand. This will save yourself time in the store because you will not be wanting to make all kinds of choices about what to cook because all those decision needs have already been made!

3. You can also save time shopping by doing nearly all of your shopping around the outer aisles of the supermarket. This is where you will find vegetables, fresh meat, eggs, milk, and bread. Spending a lot of time wandering through the grocery store aisles might suggest that you are buying a lot of processed meals with ingredients you can’t pronounce but that’s another story.

Save money on groceries with this handy little app called SimShop. Its an Aisle-by-Aisle Grocery List Software AND Grocery Coupon Organizer. It guides you aisle by aisle according to your grocery list, tracks your coupons, and tracks sales that the store might have.

4. Consider the day/time you are doing all your grocery shopping. If you’re shopping on Saturday or Sunday or in the afternoon or early evening, you are probably wasting time to do exactly what you can do during a less busy time. If you’re able to shop during or after sundown, you will find there are less shoppers than in the morning. You will be getting through the aisles and check out faster and on to doing other things that you love more than going grocery shopping.

5. When you arrive home from shopping and have put everything away, place the bottom half of the list on the fridge. This will be your meal planner.

If you glance at the list each morning and make your decision what you are going to make, you’ll take these items out of the freezer that need to be thawed. So these items are ready when you are ready to prepare your meal later in the day.

This method, just takes a couple of minutes of writing the list and yet can reduce so much stress. You know whenever you go through the list, you have everything you need to make those meals. You save time and money at the grocery store and you have all ingredients to make lots of meals.

Planning meals ahead of time DOES take a short time to get accustomed to but it creates lasting benefits to help you save money at the supermarket. This system makes it even easier.