9 Simple Ways to Save Money on Your Groceries
Easy Meal Planning |
It never fails, we budget for our groceries, but the bill always ends up being more. We underestimate, run out of things faster than expected and overall, everything is becoming just too darned expensive! To make things a little bit easier, here are 9 simple ways you can start saving money on your groceries.
1. Go with a List: Yes, I know…it’s a pretty obvious suggestion, but it’s amazing how effective it can be. You can purchase only what you need and avoid all the other yummy distractions of the grocery store.
2. Meal Planning: Planning your meals in advance makes it easier to get your list together and ensure you buy only exactly what you need. You can get help with your meal planning at Dine Without Whine AND they actually put your grocery list together for you too.
3. Eat Before You Go: Another classic tip. If you’re hungry, you’ll want to buy (and instantly eat) everything! Have a meal or good snack before you go to avoid impulse purchases.
Why Meal Planning is so Important During These Bad Economical Times
Can Planning Meals Save You Money? You Bet!
OK….let’s see a show of hands. How many of you know how much money you spend on groceries per month?
A recent unscientific survey conducted outside a grocery store in San Francisco offered some surprising results. It doesn’t seem most people keep track of how much money they spend on groceries, because trips to the grocery store usually include non-food items such as health and beauty products, pet products, etc., and there are usually several trips per week. Who scrutinizes receipts? Do most of us go to the grocery store armed with a list of just the essentials? The answer is a resounding “NO!”
My Favorite Meal Planning Software – Living Cookbook 2011
Meal planning software saves you time and money, and helps you eat healthier too!
If you are like me and have recipes scattered everywhere, you’ll like this meal planning software I just found on Amazon.com. It’s called Living Cookbook 2008 and not only will it help you organize your recipes, but it will help you do your meal planning and your grocery shopping. Sounds good to me!
Living Cookbook 2008 is the latest version of the award-winning recipe software from Radium Technologies (update: just released… Living Cookbook 2011!).
Use Living Cookbook to organize recipes, plan meals, create menus, calculate nutrition information, create shopping lists, publish cookbooks, export, e-mail and much more.
Living Cookbook 2008 is an award-winning recipe management and meal planning software, designed to help you:
- organize recipes
– plan meals
– create menus
– calculate nutrition information
– create shopping lists
– publish cookbooks
– and much more!
Manage over 1,000 Recipes with Living Cookbook meal planning software!
If that’s not enough, the Living Cookbook meal planning software comes with more than 1,000 recipes, and thousands more are available online. Living Cookbook lets you type in your recipes, scan them in or copy them from the Internet, making entering your recipes quick and easy.
The meal planning calendar lets you drag and drop your recipes onto the calendar. You can view your meal plans by day, week or month. Creating a shopping list for a meal plan is as simple as clicking on the appropriate days and selecting “Add to Grocery List” from the Action menu.
Meal Planning Software makes dieting and counting calories much easier!
If you’re dieting or just trying to eat healthier, Living Cookbook lets you calculate nutrition for any recipe, ingredient, menu or meal plan. You can customize your display to show over 150 different nutrients including calories, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and more. You can even calculate Weight Watchers Points.
One of my favorite features – and the one that saves me the most time – is the shopping list creator. Living Cookbook can create shopping lists organized by grocery aisle. Just add your ingredients, recipes, menus and meal plans and the software will do the rest. Also, if you enter the prices of your most commonly shopped-for ingredients, Living Cookbook meal planning software can calculate the total cost of your grocery list as well as subtotals for each store – very cool!
Meal Planning Software Update:
Living Cookbook has updated their software; grab your copy of Living Cookbook 2011 today!
How to Get Started Meal Planning
| Easy Meal Planning
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Meal planning may sound intimidating at first, but it’s really not that hard.
The first thing you should do is to write down all of your family’s favorite dishes. This will be very handy when you just can’t think of anything for dinner 
Next, grab the grocery ads. If you don’t get these in the mail or in your weekly newspaper, just jump online and visit your favorite grocery store’s website. Most grocery stores have their weekly ads listed right on their websites now, and some are even interactive (allowing you to create a printable shopping list – very cool!). Once you have your grocery ads in hand, scan them for sale items that can be used for this week’s meals.
Before you get to deep into your menu plan, you might want to look at your calendar for the week. If you have family or work activities that will keep you from getting home at a decent hour, you will want to plan very simple meals or even leftovers for those particular nights.
Next, you should take an inventory of the items in your fridge and pantry. Do you have any food that needs to be eaten right away? This is one of the greatest benefits of meal planning. You waste much less food because you only buy what you plan on using that week.
At this point, you should have an idea of what you want to cook for the week based on the grocery store ads, what you already have on hand, and your family’s activities for the week. Go ahead and write out the meals you plan on cooking for the week, and fill in your grocery list for the items you don’t have in hand.
All you have left to do at this point is to do the grocery shopping, post your menu on the fridge for all to see, and create your meals each day. The rest of your week should go much more smoothly now that you don’t have to worry about “what’s for dinner” at the end of each day. See how easy meal planning can be?
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Free Meal Planner Worksheet
If you’ve been looking for a free meal planner worksheet you’re in luck. I found a weekly menu planner over at HealthyMenuMailer.com this week that you can pick up for free.
It’s a simple worksheet that allows you to list breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks for each day of the week. This is a great worksheet to post on the fridge so everyone knows what’s for dinner each day.
You can find the free meal planner worksheet here:
http://www.healthymenumailer.com/ebooks/weekly-meal-plan.pdf
Weekly Menu Planner Tools
Make Meal Planning Fun
Meal planning can help you save time, money and energy, but sometimes it’s hard to come up with a fresh new meal plan each week.
One way to keep the meals fresh and fun is to get the kids involved. Ask your kids what some of their top choices are for dinner for the week and choose one or two. Your kids will be happy because they’re getting some of their favorites and you’re happy because you’ve got some dinner ideas for the week.
Another idea to make meal planning fun is to have theme nights or theme dinners. Have a Mexican night one week with all the fixin’s for a taco bar or burrito bar, and have a Chinese “take-in” night the next week where you prepare your own stir fry at home. You can make these nights even more fun by decorating or using fun plates for your theme nights, or including entertainment such as a movie or book that fits your theme for the night.
Although the point of meal planning is to make dinner easy, it helps to shake things up and plan some fun in your menus as well. Have fun!
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