Meal Planning is one of my favorite things. A big reason for that-It will save your budget and help you save money!
If you are often left wondering where on earth your money is slipping away too I have a pretty good guess…food! Grocery bills and the money you spend eating out can quite literally eat away at your monthly income FAST.
Where Did all the Money Go?
After my husband and I first got married we were living in North Carolina and both working at a private Christian school. He was a high school science teacher and me as the elementary librarian. I even got Wednesdays off each week!
All that to say…we were not exactly swimming in the money. Haha! But we were debt free (friends, when I found out during dating that he was debt free too…well hello!) and both of us were what I thought were reasonable spenders.
So we were happily going through the first year of our marriage and just never really saving what I thought we should be able to. It was frustrating to feel like money was just poof gone! I still don’t know where it all went, well what little we had!
Then my Husband started a masters program. We wanted to continue to be debt free (which we did!) so we knew in order to reach out goal things had to change.
The Start of Loving the Budget
So we made a budget! If you want to know more about what that looks like I have a whole section of my site about it. I love what following a budget can do for people and my favorite part is the freedom it brings. Sweet freedom.
After making the budget we still failed the next month. So while we had a budget it didn’t have any legs. You have to actually DO the budget. So we had to work on that.
We have tried plenty of different ways to keep track of our budget with differing amounts of success. I have looked at so many different types of budgeting apps, or weekly check-ins, writing in a spreadsheet. For us the method that works by far the best is straight up cash. We went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University and it was a huge help in understanding what we needed to be do. The program is something that I very much recommend!
Putting physical money into different envelopes really helps us to know exactly where we stand at any point of the month.
Here is how we do that!
How Much did we spend?!
First step when we first got started was tracking our food spending, since I knew that was our biggest issue.
Friends. Oh man. The shock. There were two of us. JUST two.
We were spending on average $600 a month on groceries and an additional $100/$150 on eating out.
I was floored. Looking back it does make more sense to me now. We were newly married and I wanted to treat my husband to delicious food everyday! I was doing a ton of baking, fancy drinks, fun snacks and most every meal had meat in it. Not to say we didn’t enjoy that first year (my husband still talks about how much bacon we ate then) but we were eating a huge part of our income each month!
The Savings Rolled In
We got our food budget down to $250 a month. Plus some months we did $200 depending on what was happening. Our eating out fund (we call it our fun fund) we had at $40 a month. Less than $300! Some months we even had money left over.
How did we do that? By making AND sticking to a weekly meal plan.
Looking at the money when you cut your food budget down is one of my favorite things. Let’s say that you are currently spending $700 a month on both groceries and eating out. Over the course of a year that’s $8,400. Now slash that budget to $400 and that means at the end of the year you would have spent $4800. That is $3600 saved. For most of us that is a lot of money in a year!
Give it five years and you would have saved $18,000.
This is Your Sign-Make a Meal Plan!
Not only were we able to save a ton of money but we were also eating better, healthier, with less stress and enjoying when we did eat out way more (with no guilt!).
So make that meal plan! My how-to get started is here and it could not be easier. It takes some work but once you start you won’t want to go back!
