Meal Planning/Grocery Shopping

Oh, hello there!! How has a month went by since I last posted? 

Life is pretty crazy around here-so it goes by pretty quickly, to be honest. I would love to tell you that October is pretty laid back for us but...it's not. We have plans every weekend in October, but I will try harder to post more than once a month!

I mentioned in a previous post that Jon and I are really trying to budget/kill debt/save money/BUILD A HOUSE!! 

We have found when we sat down to start the process that we spend a lot of money on going out to eat. A LOT. Since I do the cooking for our family, I wanted to find ways to prevent this. Insert meal planning.

I go to the grocery store twice a month-with a weekly trip for milk and produce. I sit down on Thursday night the week I go shopping and it takes me approximately 2 hours to meal plan, but it saves us literally $100's every month.

I have had several people ask me how I do my meal planning and couponing. I decided to split the two topics up, so meal planning is up first.

First of all-here are my tools:

Erin Condren Life Planner (with my Recipe notes opened), coupon organizer, essentials list, and meal plan template

I use my meal plan template that I based off of my friend Amanda's template. I fill in any social events first that will require us to eat out (date nights, etc). 

When it comes to deciding what meals to make I first look through my inventory sheets to see what I have on hand, then I will go through my coupons to see what meals I can make out of coupons that are expiring. From there I fill in any meals I can make with items that are on sale. Anything left over, I plan according to what we want/what sounds good.

I really try to utilize foods the best I can. For example, we only use about 1/3 of a pot of spaghetti sauce at a time. I will go ahead and make an entire pot, then freeze the other 2/3 for a later date. If we make steaks, I will make 2-3 extra and cut them into strips for quesadillas. Once a month, I will bake a bunch of chicken breasts and shred them and put the shredded chicken into ziploc bags. We use shredded chicken a lot and it really does save time to just thaw out a bag of it that's premade.

Anyways...after I've filled in all the columns, I make sure I have everything I need to make the meals-if I don't have an ingredient-it goes on the shopping list. Once I have that meal's ingredients, I check mark the meal so I know it's accounted for.

I go through my list and put a circle (sometimes I will highlight) items that I have a coupon for. When I make the list I also note anything special about the item with a coupon (such as the brand name or how many I need to purchase).

Then I make sure I have all the coupons clipped on my clipboard and I'm ready to go!

You will see on the bottom of the sheet I give myself an estimated bill to expect-along with the total of coupons that I have. This week I actually came in quite a bit under my estimated amount-which is always a good thing! But-I didn't have to buy diapers, dog food, meat, etc.