Step 20 of The Financial Fitness Bootcamp Course

Often food is the largest variable expense in our budgets. Certain habits will really hike up the food budget category: eating out, shopping at expensive grocery stores, not meal planning, letting food go to waste/go bad, not having food storage to make impromptu meals from, and buying pre-made expensive items that can be made from scratch much cheaper.

In our book, Living a Rich Life as a Stay-at-Home Mom we cover in-depth multiple ways to save on food (even ways to save for those who don’t want to use coupons).

Cutting down expense in your food category on your budget will help significantly. And one of the best ways to do this is to make a meal plan for a week or two at a time. Planning out what you will eat and make sure you have the items for those meals will help you stick to your plan.

Challenge #20- Is to make a meal plan for this coming week. Write down on your phone, a calendar, planner, or even just a piece of paper what you plan to eat morning, afternoon, and evening. When you do your grocery shopping make sure you have the necessary ingredients for those meals.

Meal planning doesn’t need to be hard. For breakfast and lunch, you can just write down ideas for seven meals of the week. Just make sure you have enough supplies for those meals. For dinner try to be thorough because if you are missing an ingredient it may not be possible to make the meal.

Bonus task- Choose your meals based on items that are on sale at your grocery store and use coupons (digital, printable, and paper) on the items you can.

Not sure how to use digital/printable/paper coupons? Check out this post here.