How To Meal Plan On A Budget

Creating a meal plan on a budget can be tricky, but we’re here to help! Use these savvy tips to create affordable plans that work for you!

Preparing three meals a day for your family or yourself can be overwhelming. If you’re on a budget, it’s even more difficult. In this post, I’m sharing my tips and strategies for creating a meal plan on a budget!

How often do you come home on a Wednesday, dreading making dinner? You either have no idea what to cook, go to the store and spend way too much money, or, even worse, order delivery. It happens to all of us. Planning out your meals will make your life easier and save you money.

Meal planning is simply knowing what your meals will be throughout the week. It’s not the same as meal prepping, which is preparing complete meals. Meal prepping requires much more time because you cook meals for the whole week. In my opinion, meal planning gives you a little more flexibility. You still know what you’ll eat all week, but you don’t have to dedicate an entire Sunday afternoon to preparing meals. Planning the meals ahead of time and making sure you have everything you need makes life easier throughout the week

In this post, I’m sharing my tips for how to meal plan on a budget and how to pull together as quickly and stressful as possible.

Meal Plan On A Budget

You’ll notice that I work a little backwards. Creating a meal plan on a budget means saving money every step of the way, and that starts with setting a budget, using things you already have, and scouring sales ads. Only then can you plan out your meals.

If you’re a family with young kids, your meal plan will look different than mine. For us, breakfast usually consists of scrambled eggs with cottage cheese and fruit. It takes five minutes. There’s no planning there, but I make sure those items are on my grocery list. All that to say, you don’t have to have a grand plan for every single meal. Sometimes, it’s simply having the ingredients to quickly pull your go-to meals together.

1. Set A Budget

First and foremost, you need to know how much money you have to work with. Depending on how many people you have to feed, your weekly food budget can be drastically different than mine, which is why this post gives you the tools you need to meal plan on a budget rather than giving you a set meal plan.

2. Shop Your Kitchen

Once you’ve set a budget, shop your entire kitchen. Look for items in the pantry, refrigerator, and freezer near expiration. If you’ve had leftover chili in the freezer for three months, it’s time to eat it, and that’s one less meal for the week you need to plan. After you do this, you will have a list of ingredients and meals that should be used first. Remember, wasting food is throwing money in the trash, and we don’t do that here!

3. Shop Sales

You want to do this before you make a list of meals. If a great deal catches your eye, plan some meals around that. Try to find deals on items you can pair with some of the ingredients from above that you already have. For example, if you already have two bags of frozen broccoli and some rice, all you need is a protein. You could make beef and broccoli over rice if ground beef is on sale. If chicken breast is on sale, you could make a broccoli, chicken, and rice casserole. Combining ingredients you already have, with some on sale, is a great place to start when creating a meal plan on a budget.

Helpful Products
Meal Planning Pad	Bento Meal Container	Grocery Shopping Pad

4. Write Your Meal Plan

Now it’s time to write your meal plan. This step is the most difficult for people. One day, I was talking to my daughter, and she said, “Some people can’t think of things like you, Mom.” I’ve never forgotten that. My brain never shuts off when it comes to food and recipes, but if you struggle to come up with ideas for meals, there are millions of ideas on the Internet. I recommend doing specific searches on Google. For example, if a rice bowl sounds good, you can search “rice bowl” + chicken, and this will only bring up rice bowls with chicken. Without the quotation marks, you will get results for anything with a bowl, rice, and chicken.

Using a pad like this, write down the recipes you want to make on one side and the ingredients you need on the other, crossing off ingredients you already have. When doing this, combine as many ingredients as possible into one meal. For example, if chicken breast is on sale this week, you can use it in many different ways, like my chicken congee, high-protein pasta salad, or 4-ingredient chicken salad. Rice bowls are a great meal prep because the variations are endless. I make a batch of my oven-baked rice every week.

5. Time To Shop

Now, you have a plan and a list, but there are more ways to save on groceries, and I share 25 tips in this post. If you’re usually tempted by other things at the grocery store, consider having your groceries delivered. Additional fees are sometimes involved, but it may save you money if you know you’ll be tempted to buy other things. My two favorite services are Instacart and Amazon Fresh.

With Instacart, I pay for the annual membership, which gives me free delivery on orders of $35 or more.
Amazon Fresh does not have surcharges, but it does have a delivery fee.

Meal Plan On A Budget – Extra Tips

Avoid Unique Ingredients

Avoid using unique ingredients that will only be used for one meal. For example, if you find a recipe for chicken curry that calls for unique spices, buy a jar of curry sauce instead. Remember that recipes are guides, not rules, and many ingredients can be substituted or omitted. I wouldn’t go out and buy a five-dollar seasoning for one recipe. I would find a way to work around it. This also helps you repurpose ingredients you already have.

Stock Up On Essentials

Having a variety of seasonings and condiments on hand helps you pull together meals quickly and easily change them up. For example, suppose you meal prep my broiled chicken thighs. You can completely change the flavor profile by switching up the seasonings you use and the condiments you serve with it. Slowly stock up on seasonings and condiments when they’re on sale. You should be fully stocked within a few weeks, and these ingredients will last a while.

Canned Protein

Most people think of the meat or seafood department when choosing a main protein, but canned tuna and salmon are healthy and affordable protein options. Tuna salad with rice crackers is one of my favorite high-protein, five-minute lunches, and I always make my high-protein tuna pasta salad for meal prep!

Cook Once, Eat Twice

At the beginning of your meal plan journey, you can freeze ingredients like cooked protein, rice, and raw and cooked veggies. You’ll have a freezer stocked with ready-to-go ingredients within a few weeks. I always double my broiled chicken thigh recipe and freeze the meat into one-cup portions. You can use these ingredients to pull together quick and easy meals.

I hope this is helpful! If you have any tips you'd like to share, please let us know in the comments below. Be sure to follow me on Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook, and sign up for my email list so you don’t miss anything new. Thanks for being here, friends ♥

How To Meal Plan On A Budget

Creating a meal plan on a budget can be tricky, but we’re here to help! Use these savvy tips to create affordable plans that work for you!