Meal planning!?!
I’ve been dragging my feet getting started with it. I know in my head that it’ll alleviate stress at dinnertime and take saving money to the next level.
I’m not a planner and choose what I want to eat on a given day by what sounds good. It’s not working any more.
We’ve been really busy over the last few months and busy = eating out way too much. There it is…my confession. Eating out is a budget blower, but it can be so enticing when you’re dead tired at the end of the day. Well, it needs to stop.
We’re likely traveling to South Africa in the next 6 months to pick up our little girl and it’s going to be an EXPENSIVE trip.
We’re going into no-spend mode. Basically aside from the usual grocery and gas purchase, we run every potential purchase past each other. We’re keeping one date night dinner out a week and we each get one lunch out a week. Anything additional needs to come from our personal allowance or it doesn’t happen.
In comes meal planning…
We sat down on Sunday and starting making a list of our 30 favorite dinner ideas. I grabbed our weekly white board, used the list and wrote down a plan for the week.
Monday – Spaghetti
Tuesday – Chicken sausages, baked beans and corn on the cob
Wednesday – Chocolate Chip Whole Wheat pancakes, scrambled eggs with broccoli
Thursday – leftovers
Friday – Hamburgers with garden veggies
Saturday – Grilled chicken with summer veggies
Sunday – Homemade pizza
And last night we ate spaghetti paired with green beans and zucchini from the garden. And it felt freeing! I didn’t have the usual “what’s for dinner?” stress throughout the day.
Are you a meal-planner?
