
FREE WEEKLY MEAL PLANNER FREE
I’ve been there and done it enough times to tell you that you need to match your personal home planner to the menu planner FIRST! FREE Tools to Meal Planning Success Out of any tip/trick, this is the most crucial! If you don’t do this, you will buy food you don’t have time to make and you’ll end up in the drive thru line. Do you have time on Sunday to do a pretty good meal prep? Then use that time to prep a couple of sheet pan meals to toss in the oven in between getting home and getting back out the door. Is it crazy soccer week? Then, maybe pull all the slow cooker recipes and use those. You are trying to make a match between how much time you will have to prepare each meal. Spend 10 minutes and look over what the next week has coming up.
FREE WEEKLY MEAL PLANNER HOW TO
Great food doesn’t need to cost a lot!Īt least two nights a week, you will get a break in the kitchen, but you’re family will still gett a home-cooked meal on the table.Īlso – remember to scroll down to the end of the post for the free printable meal planner! How To Use Weekly Frugal Meal Plansīefore you jump in, there are a few tried and true things that will make this successful. As a whole, the meal plan will be frugal.One meal that is ready in 30 minutes or less.That’s why in each frugal weekly meal plan, you’ll find the following: I know you guys are interested in serving tasty dinners without totally blowing your budgets even though you don’t always have the time to cook! You can just pick and choose from those if you’re using this as a starting point for your own meal planning. I’ll call out the nights on the meal plan that fit into a category ( e.g. Yikes! With frugal meal planning, I got much better at using everything I bought and eliminating the waste. Everything I threw out was money I wasted.

It was my Saturday-Refrigerator-Clean-Out-Day. No matter how hard I tried, I ended up throwing away groceries that I wasn’t able to use. I pack them into meal prep containers and send them with my husband for his lunch. Even with a teenage boy, I end up with leftovers from dinners. Planning ahead lets me find recipes that are tasty and won’t break the bank. Those costs added up really fast and my wallet was not happy with me. Before I started meal planning, I would pick up convenience food at the store or just order take-out. I then go to the grocery store, prep as much as I can and get myself ready for the week’s meals. Instead of frantically putting together meals each night, I spend Sunday morning putting a list together of the meals I want to make for the week. That is where frugal meal planning comes in. Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of extra time to make dinners, so I have to be smart.

I am always running him to sports, scouts or heading to the store for one thing or another. Notice that I said “in my head?” Reality is a lot different.

In my head, I will stand in the kitchen, making a delicious meal while my son does his homework and the house is nice and peaceful. I always seem to overestimate how much time I’ll have to cook each night. I usually have enough for leftovers for the next day, which helps me save money. Where these meals REALLY stretch the dollar is in the amount that they make.
