Today is the first installment of a series I will be working on entitled, “Saving Money on the Road”. In my post 2 weeks ago, I professed my love for YNAB from both a professional and a personal standpoint. Today’s topic combines two of my favorite things, budgeting and food. Whether you live in a house or an RV with your family, your grocery budget can easily grow into a monster. If you are anything like me, you can walk into the grocery store without a list and walk out with 3 bags and $100 less in your bank account. So, what’s my secret to saving money on groceries?
Having a Plan and Making a List!
Making a list is essential to staying on budget and on task while at the grocery store. But having a list is actually not the first step to making sure I save money at the grocery store. I have to have a plan first. My favorite meal planning tool is Plan to Eat.
Plan to Eat
Plan to Eat is a website with an accompanying app that has 3 primary parts: recipe saver, meal planner
Recipe Saver
This part allows you to save your personal recipes into the website. This is essential to the overall function of the rest of the features. There is even a recipe saver script that will pull recipes off of websites. It’s a great feature!
Meal Planner
The calendar tool provides places to plan breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack and a notes section. We don’t often eat the same foods, except for dinner so that tends to be all that I plan for most of the time. But I absolutely LOVE the notes area! When we were a busy family of 6 and have different kids at different activities and sports events, I was able to add notes like, “very busy night, we need to eat out”. Sometimes I would even go so far as to put what city we would be in and add the name of the restaurant to avoid the “where are we going to eat?” arguments. This was usually a restaurant that I had a coupon for or knew that I could feed all 6 of us relatively inexpensively. Even though we only have 2 teens still at home, I still use this note area to write notes about how our schedule could possibly affect our eating plans. This is especially true of moving days. I need to be sure I have snacks planned and possibly even sandwiches and chips for lunches on the road. I also make notes about the day of each week that I want to go grocery shopping on, etc.
To use the calendar, all you have to do is simply drag and drop your recipes from the recipe sidebar and drop it into the calendar on the day you would like to prepare that meal. At this point, I can add additional ingredients to that day. For instance, if I plan Salisbury steak for Thursday night, I also have to add potatoes for mashed potatoes. Or if we are having buffalo chicken dip on Tuesday, I know that I also have to purchase tortilla chips.
Grocery List
The third area is probably my favorite. Once you have your plan made, simply set the dates that you will be shopping for and the system will automatically populate your grocery list for you. Take the list that it makes and check it off against what’s in your pantry, refrigerator and freezer. What’s left is your grocery list. You can add additional items to your list if you need to at this point. The list can be printed out or you can use the app to check off the items at the store.
Sharing is Caring
Plan to Eat also allows
Cost
Plan to Eat offers a yearly subscription cost or it can be paid for monthly. As of the writing of this article, the current annual price of Plan to Eat is $39 or the monthly price of $4.95. Since we are discussing saving money, I have a money saving tip for you on Plan to Eat. Each year, Plan to Eat offers a 50% off deal. This deal used to be the Friday – Sunday following Thanksgiving. In 2018, they changed the deal to the Monday – Sunday of the week following Thanksgiving. The best way I believe to do the subscription is to pay the full price for the first year, then renew at the discounted rate in November. Once you renew, it adds the year on to the end of your existing subscription. In my opinion, it is completely worth $39 for the year! For $19.50 on sale, Plan to Eat is an absolute steal! With our family of 4, if Plan to Eat causes us to eat out 1 less fast food meal per year, it’s completely paid for itself!
In conclusion, Plan to Eat is the best tool I have found for meal planning AND for making a shopping list. I hope that you will find grocery shopping much easier and enjoyable with Plan to Eat!
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