Do you meal plan?

[GoodSteward]

How much time and effort do you put into meal planning, or do you meal plan at all?

If you do meal plan, how do you do it?

[GoodSteward]

I didn't want to overload the first post, so I will put my thoughts here.

I think you should buy food as diligently as you plan savings or other areas. I have a spread sheet with two pages. One page has the days of the week with each meal/snack needed for two weeks(I have found it easier to buy in builk and stay within budget with two weeks). I go along plugging in meals, and figuring a little extra for the meals I want to have leftovers for lunches.

Once I get that filled in, I use my "Food calculator" ( it is labeled that in google drive lol) to plug in the food I need for those meals factoring in what I have. It's just an area to make a grocery list that accounts for quantity and assumed price. At the top I have my budgeted amount and I just go down the list filling in what I need to fill the menu. If I hit the end of my budget before having what I need, I adjust the menu to reduce what I need (cheaper meal). After all that, I then usually look over my local grocery stores sales paper real quick to see if anything of interest is there. We don't buy a bunch of junk or sweets, so there isn't usually a lot. I rarely coupon just because I buy a lot of store brands for things that we are ok with. Some things taste just fine store brand, others...not so much.

My mother likes to buy whatever is on sale. She will buy all this food she can't use yet, only because it is on sale. She also will only buy name brand, even if it isn't on sale. Sad.. She doesn't budget or meal plan, so she is still out of money and spends more on food than she should. My aunts do similar, but to much greater loss. They stock pile food because they love them some BOGO sales. They have multiple freezers full, and still buy fresh meats or things because they often don't have time to thaw them out. Then, every so often they have to go through and just chunk a ton of meats and frozen things because they forgot about it and never used it. Buying on sale doesn't help if you don't plan for it.

I also think food and meal planning is one of the biggest portions of a budgets failure or success. If you don't plan enough money for food, you will over spend ruining your budget, and eventually getting discouraged thinking you can't do a budget. If you plan too much, you are throwing out food and wasting a lot of money. If you don't budget food at all, you will most assuredly spend a lot, usually in the form of eating out. Speaking of, eating out will also ruin your food budget if you don't plan for it. I meal plan to make sure my food budget is balanced. Plenty to eat, little waste, not getting fat off junk or blowing money eating out all the time. lol

[rennigade]

I meal plan in the sense that when we go to the grocery store or costco we already know what we are getting. We do not randomly browse and decide on the fly. That sounds like torture. The less time in a grocery store the better.

[Outdoorsygal]

No but this has been a goal of mine for a long time

The closest we come to meal planning is when I can get my husband (though I don't ask) to drink the vegetable juice I've juiced as our lunch. Usually it's on the weekend. It is much cheaper to juice w/organic vegetables & fruit and skip lunch.

[bjl584]

yes. I pre make my meals for the week. It takes an hour or two on Sunday to do.

I try to eat healthy and am into fitness, so that is the main reason I pre make my meals.

[frugalNH]

I've been pretty lazy about it lately. I more do what I feel like for dinner over sticking to a plan when the days get busy with the kids and the temps. hike up!

But when I'm doing it (90% of the time), I start by picking through my grocer's weekly sale circular. I pair things we have on hand with things I'll buy on sale that week to make 7 nights of dinner. I try to pick things most of the time that will yield decent leftovers for hubby's lunches. When things we use are on sale, I stock up and buy at least a few extra so that we have a pretty decent pantry. I also try to keep at least 2 or 3 nights of no-brainer quick meals on hand for days that unexpectedly run awry. This eliminates the siren call of take-out if things get really hectic. No excuse to eat out when all I need to do is throw something in the oven or microwave.

This helps me keep the grocery bill down while still eating a varied diet we enjoy. I could go quite a while off my stocked freezer, dry and canned goods. I shop once a week only, save for perhaps a rare trip to a second store for a super sale. We need to replenish dairy goods and produce weekly.

As I've been meal planning like this for at least a few years, it typically takes me 10-30 mins. It runs on the longer side f I've decided to try a new recipe and need to confirm what ingredients we have already.

[disneysteve]

We don't nearly as much as we ought to.

That said, we have a standard repertoire of meals that we tend to cycle through and we try to keep the ingredients for most of them on hand. If we decide to make something that we don't have in stock, we'll just run out and pick up the missing items.

It's somewhat hard to plan meals because our schedules are fairly busy and sometimes change at the last minute. Also, and I guess this is more personal preference, but I have no idea today what I'm going to want for dinner on Wednesday. It may turn out that we have lunch brought in to the office that day and I'll just want a light dinner. Or lunch will have been chicken so I don't want chicken again for dinner, even if that's what we had planned to do. Or I'll just have a crazy day and come home exhausted and have no interest in preparing an involved meal (I do a fair amount of the cooking at our house).

[kork13]

We have been roughly planning our meals for a few months now. We basically just select the main dish for each day's dinner, and do that one month at a time. That way I'm able to purchase or thaw anything we need for those meals a day or two in advance, and it has allowed us to be alot better about eating good dinners more often & earlier in the evening. When we don't plan things out (or I don't prep properly), we end up scrambling for something simple/easy, or end up doing dinner WAY late, like 7:30 or 8pm.

I tend to cook in large batches (I grew up cooking in a family of 7), so I always end up having plenty of extras for our lunches (typically at least 2-4 extra portions).

What does help me is that I always maintain a fairly consistent baseline stock of basic foodstuffs, so I rarely need to make special grocery run for particular ingredients. Either I already have it on hand, or thanks to the monthly meal plan, I can get what I need during our normal 1-2x weekly shopping trips.

[sv2007]

I also think food and meal planning is one of the biggest portions of a budgets failure or success. If you don't plan enough money for food, you will over spend ruining your budget, and eventually getting discouraged thinking you can't do a budget. If you plan too much, you are throwing out food and wasting a lot of money. If you don't budget food at all, you will most assuredly spend a lot, usually in the form of eating out. Speaking of, eating out will also ruin your food budget if you don't plan for it. I meal plan to make sure my food budget is balanced. Plenty to eat, little waste, not getting fat off junk or blowing money eating out all the time. lol

I don't think small areas like food is worth spending too much efforts in the budget. It may be useful for someone with very little money, but for the majority the energy can be better spent on larger savings. For example, a bad decision in investment/loan terms/etc (because the energy needed to review terms/shop rates was spent on food budget can probably waste years of food budge savings)

We don't really budget for food, but we do meal plan, esp when we throw a party whether we cook or cater it (pre-kid, we host parties more spontaneously). We usually plan a day or 2 in advance: on where we want to eat or what we want to cook (and buy ingredients usually the day before). Except for fruits, the 40-lb rice, and gal. soy sauce, we pretty much buy what we'd cook immediately (and we'd change our meal plan if the ingredients aren't available or not good quality). Every now and then I'd get a craving for something specific, and sometimes that takes more/longer planning.

I think each person's meal planning (or lack of) is probably learned growing up. My parents almost never plan out meals more than 1 week. I'm always impressed (even when I was a kid) upon seeing folks buy a whole cart load of food (sometimes even 2) at the super markets.

[sv2007]

Although we don't have a specific budget for food, when we eat at more expensive restaurants for days in a row, we'd kind of automatically limit restaurant spending for the next few days. So even without a budget, the food cost is pretty consistent every month (based on CC bills each month).

We don't have budgets for daily spendings, and our CC bills have been extremely consistent for years when we exclude large spends (e.g. vacations, major purchases, etc.). We actually don't budget for large spends too, but I don't think that works for most. However, the routine daily spends; I'd say try not to budget and see if it stays constant ... maybe you won't need a budget.

[kork13]

I forgot to mention that one of the simple ways I make meal planning simpler is by having a daily theme for each day of the week.

Sunday is crock pot, Monday is chicken, Tuesday beef, Wednesday leftovers or vegetarian, Thursday pork, Friday pizza or pasta, Saturday "chef's choice" (something that we need to get rid of).

It's not perfect, but it keeps our meals varied, and helps to guide our brainstorming when we create our monthly menu.

[snafu]

My mom didn't call it meal planning but we pretty much knew there would be some form of pasta every Monday as that was mom's busiest day and most of those dishes could be on the table in 30 minutes with salad and two veggie side dishes. Wednesday was always vegetarian and Sunday mostly a big meal featuring roasted meat, piped/special potato, salads, some type of green bean or veggie casserole and likely a fruit dessert like cobbler, grunt, crisp, crumble, betty, buckle, pandowdy or funnel cake.

I meal plan mostly because I need to know walking in the door, what I'm going to make for dinner. It's less stressful and ingredients are at hand. I used it when I created the grocery shopping list. My best trick is Friday buffet. Set out all leftovers 'Korean' style + rice or baked potatoes and choose what you like! Condiments/sauces are on the door in the fridge. If only bits, it's boboli bread's style, home made pizza. Our kid's friends thought it was a big treat! If there's too much, it becomes some type of stew or hearty soup. Add fresh bakery buns and it's a meal with fruit as 'afters.' I never suggest it's leftovers...no one would eat it.

It's so easy to ask the family their 5 favorite meals and rotate through them in some form so that you're using seasonal ingredients, loss leaders/sale items and the stuff in the pantry and deep freeze before it reaches expiry. Just enter some ingredient in the search box of All Recipes and have 30 choices in a nano second.

[rennigade]

yes. I pre make my meals for the week. It takes an hour or two on Sunday to do.

I try to eat healthy and am into fitness, so that is the main reason I pre make my meals.

We also make our meals on sunday for the entire week for the most part. I didnt really understand sv2007's original question because it takes them 5 paragraphs to make a point.

[GoodSteward]

The closest we come to meal planning is when I can get my husband (though I don't ask) to drink the vegetable juice I've juiced as our lunch. Usually it's on the weekend. It is much cheaper to juice w/organic vegetables & fruit and skip lunch.

I love my blendtec. Chews through anything. Saves me time in prep, and has a 7 year warranty. They recently replaced the jar for free (120$) due to seal around the blade breaking. Great company!

[disneysteve]

I don't think small areas like food is worth spending too much efforts in the budget.

I disagree. I think food spending is something that gets a lot of people in trouble, especially when they're just starting out. And especially when they are eating out a lot rather than cooking at home. That can sink you in no time since restaurant meals typically cost 5-10 times what making the same meal at home would cost.

Many times, someone has come to this site seeking help and when they posted their budget, they were spending more to feed 2 people than many here spend to feed a family of 4 or 5. Reforming the food spending can sometimes free up several hundred dollars each month that can be used for debt reduction, retirement savings, whatever.