When it comes to popular money-saving tips one thing you often hear is to start meal planning. While meal planning may not be one of the most entertaining ways to save money, it can be incredibly effective for saving money on food for your family. Food is one of our big expenses after mortgages and utility bills, I have written previously about saving on utility bills.
Meal planning is a great way to ensure you use up leftovers in your refrigerator. When planning your menu, take an inventory of the leftovers you have and make plans to use them up first. Get creative and make new meals from what you have left. During each week plan to use leftovers before they can go bad. Whether it be for lunches or creating new meals. This will prevent costly food waste.
Use up what you have in the house already. Taking advantage of the pantry items and everything in your freezer is a great way to save money overall when feeding your family. Often we forget what we have in our homes and let it go bad before we can use them up. Like with using leftovers meal planning is a great way to reduce food waste helping you get full use of the money you spend on food.
Meal planning allows you to take advantage of sales. This is a great way to save money on food for your family. Check the sales to find the best deals before sitting down to plan your meals. Then plan meals using the best deals you can find to save money overall. As regular readers will know I am a huge lover of yellow sticker shopping and I have shared previously how I got How I got £110 worth of food for under £8-50.
Planning meals out ahead of time solves the question of what’s for dinner that often leads to unplanned expenses from eating out. When you know what is for dinner and you have a plan to get it cooked when it is time it is easier to avoid spending money you don’t need to. For busy days plan things that can be tossed in the slow cooker in the morning or meals that can be cooked quickly in an instant pot.
One book that can really help you get to grips with meal planning and saving money is Feed Your Family for £20 a Week written by Lorna Cooper. The book offers 100 delicious budget family meals that everyone will enjoy. It teaches how to make family favourites like sausage pasta bake and Colcannon.
What I really liked is that this encourages you to save portions of the meals and then reuse them the following day for lunches. This is something I have been doing as Erin likes to take leftovers for school packed lunches instead of eating the same sandwiches everyday! Chloe (who is at university) also does this and uses the second meal when travelling to hockey games at weekends and on Wednesdays. It saves both time and money and is an ideal way of using up every last bit of a meal. It also reduces food waste which is better for everyone.
I have been given a copy of Feed Your Family For £20 A Week to run a giveaway for my readers too. To enter just follow the Rafflecopter instructions. It is for UK readers only and closes on Feb 3rd at 12pm
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Spaghetti bolognese as I always cook more and freeze for another time
Lasagne