Eating (Pretty) Well on a Budget: Know the Price of Food & Meal Plan

If you want to save money on food, the best thing you can do to cut costs, is to know what food should cost. If you're looking through your grocery ads and you see chicken breasts in there at $2.99 a pound you may think that's a good price since it's in the ad. But, once you start paying attention to the ads, you'll realize that chicken breasts will pretty regularly go on sale for $1.99 a pound or even cheaper once in a while. If you buy 6 pounds of chicken in one go to last you for the month, right there you could save $6 by waiting to buy it when it goes on sale.

Start looking through those grocery ads that come in the mail. Or go online and check the ad for your grocery store each week if you don't get it in the mail. Specifically pay attention to the costs of meat, seafood and dairy. After a few months, you'll start noticing what the good and great prices on certain items are. That's when you should be stocking up on those things. Meat and seafood freeze really well so if ground turkey is on sale for $2.99 a package, which is a good price, buy 3 or 4 packages to last you a month or two. After a year or so of doing this, I decided that aside from seafood or the occasional steak (like once or twice a year), I wasn't going to spend more than $2.99/pound for meat. Pork chops and roasts and beef roasts are usually more than that per pound, so I really only buy those things when they're at or under $2.99/pound. While meat, seafood and dairy are generally the most expensive things you buy, it's also good to know good prices on pasta, canned tuna, produce, etc. Like one of my fast go to meals is baked beans, so when canned baked beans go on sale, I buy 2 or 3 cans so I hopefully won't have to pay full price for them.

Once you know what the good prices are, you can start meal planning based on what is on sale that week. Meal planning is another great way to save money. If you have something planned for dinner every night and everything on hand to make it, you'll be much less likely to eat out. When you look at the ads each week, check what is on sale and base your meals around what's on sale. If drumsticks are on sale for 79 cents a pound plan one or maybe two meals that week using drumsticks. While you're at the store, pick up an extra package of drumsticks to keep in the freezer to use in the future. If you see a good price on shredded mozzarella, plan to do pizza one night. There are lots of different tips out there for meal planning. After a few years of trying some different things, I found my favourite way to meal plan that works best for me.

I set each day of the week as a certain protein and plan a meal for that.
Sunday: beef or pork
Monday: meatless
Tuesday: ground turkey or sausage
Wednesday: seafood
Thursday: chicken
Friday: easy (canned beans, etc.)
Saturday: sandwiches, quesadillas, other easy meals

Once a week I sit down to do my meal planning for the following week. Using the above format I can check what's in my freezer and what's on sale. If pork chops or a beef roast is on sale that week that's the first thing I plan for the week. If neither are on sale I go to my freezer. When I first started doing this I didn't always have something in my freezer, so I'd do another chicken meal to cover that week because chicken is much more affordable than the other proteins so it's always something I have always had in my freezer. From there I can plan the rest of my meals for the week.

I got the free background for this meal plan from Photo by Lukas from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/board-bunch-cooking-food-349609/