A Guide For Beginners To Start Meal Planning

If you’re struggling to come up with what to make every night, this is a great starting place! Meal planning can help you to save money and avoid expensive takeout. You can also avoid stress by knowing what you are going to eat when. There are so many ways to plan your meals, but whichever way you choose you will save money by making a plan and sticking to it.

Meal planning is not necessarily the same thing as meal prep, or freezer meals although there can be overlap. Meal prep usually consists of chopping, cooking, and preserving your foods for a couple of days or a week. You can meal prep as much or little as you like to meal plan, Freezer meals are meals that are prepared and then frozen to be reheated at a later date. If you want to meal prep or use freezer meals, meal planning can help you to do so.

I love coming up with meal plans- for some reason it’s something that makes sense to me. The hardest part I have found is how to make sure you have enough food for larger numbers. Smaller meal plans are easy to come up with and leftovers are usually abundant.

Related: No Spend Challenge

Why Meal Plan?

Meal planning can help you to save money by not turning to take out foods or going to buy new groceries for each gourmet recipe you run across on the internet. You can save money by staying out of the grocery store as well.

Planning your meals can help you stick to your budget for groceries so that you can see where you can cut back and where you can be extravagant with your budget.

Here are some of the most common ways to meal plan.

Common Meal Planning Strategies

Only Plan Dinner

When you plan only dinner, you have a lot less planning going on. Dinner is typically the most expensive meal and the one that families usually get to enjoy together.

Planning Dinner, With Some Ideas For Other Meals

You can plan for just dinner, but have an idea of other foods your family may be eating for lunch or breakfast.

Plan Every Meal For Every Day

Planning every meal can be especially helpful to ensure you have everything you need to not be making unnecessary runs to the grocery store.

Draw A Stick

This is an idea where you have your family’s favorite meals written out on a popsicle stick and each night you pull one out and that’s your meal.

Plan Meal Ideas For Breakfast, Lunch, And Dinner But With Flexibility

You can plan enough of each type of meal but then depending on what you or your family desires that day is what you have.

How Much Planning?

Plan For 3 Days

Planning for three days at a time, may mean that you are going to the store two or three times a week to get more groceries for the next few days.

Plan For A Week

If you plan for a week at a time this typically means that you’re only going to the store once a week. I would say that this is the most common meal planning strategy.

Plan For A Month

Planning for a whole month of meals can take a lot of upfront work. But this means that every three days or every week you won’t be planning a ton. Some people may only go to the store once a month while others may plan the whole month but take a weekly trip to pick up perishable items.

Plan For 6 Months

Planning for six months at a time is only for the extreme planner. I would not recommend trying this method to start with. In order to stick to your plan, it’s best if you can achieve your goal quickly. Also you may not know exactly how much you will be eating in a 6 month time period.

Write It Out

Once you have decided how long you will be planning your meals, it’s important to write it down. This can be digitally, or physically, but having it written down can help you to stick to your plan. There are tons of free or paid printables for meal planning available, or you can create your own. You don’t even need to have a fancy printable if you don’t want to. You can use a piece of scrap paper, lined paper, or even printer paper. Whatever works for you is what will work best.

Choosing Meals

Check which items you already have in your fridge, freezer, and pantry and come up with meals using those items.
Check ads to see which items are on sale.
Do not try to make all new recipes, make several tried and true ones and add in one or two new ones in each plan.
Try to come up with recipes that use similar ingredients for around the same time, so that your fresh foods don’t go to waste.
Don’t use recipes with special ingredients- they tend to be expensive and some often goes to waste.
Plan your shopping
Try to only go to one store for all ingredients.
Decide how often you will go, once a month, once a week, twice a week, or more or less.
Make your list easy- put ingredients in order of the store.