Meal planning and budgeting is like and Olympic sport for me. My accountant called me a magician last year for being able to sustain our finance goals without seeing me enter a facility.
The food, however, is the biggest expense a family can have with the average household spending on average $224.00 at the supermarket. Families also on the average throw out $1036 in food waste every year. While that’s only $20.00 a week, that’s still a decent family get away come, the end of the year.
So last week I royally stuffed up the budget and left myself just $74.00 for the weeks groceries- ordinarily we average $160. Now I could have withdrawn money from other accounts however it was Saturday afternoon; Monday was a holiday I accepted the challenge that $74.00 was it.
Now I didn’t get everything I wanted and this $74.00 challenge doesn’t include any cleaning or personal products I made do for those.
So how I got the most of my $74.00…
- I meal planned the week out. I do this ordinarily but this week I did all meals. Determine breakfast, snacks, lunches and dinners. I only meal plan for five days. In case you’re interested in this particular week we lived it up on Butter chicken {using $3.00 drumsticks on special in the slower cooker}, Sausages and vegetables, Spag Bol, Roast chicken pieces and vegetables, and Beef Curry and Rice.
- I utilized the leftovers of the previous week by freezing and using for lunches.
- I cooked up a bunch of cupcakes and a sultana cake for snacks with the basics we already had.
- This royal challenge saw me using it as an opportunity to use what was in my freezer and pantry. Which was some sausages and blade steak.
- I worked out my ingredients for said meals and wrote down what I didn’t have into my shop.
- I then added the other essentials such as bread, milk and cat food.
- I then discovered if you can shop without the kids it’s awesome and I took along a calculator {or better still buy online}. I picked last Sunday as my shop day I went in as soon as they opened my eyes peeled for the discount aisle. I was like an elderly stealth bomber, looking for discounted meats. I then literally recorded the amounts down on a piece of paper and then hid down the back end of the store and calculated my shop it’s a wonder I didn’t have security tapping me on the shoulder. I then went through the self-serve checkout because accidentally forgetting to scan an item is less embarrassing than not having the funds for it.
- I then placed the ‘meal plan’ on to the fridge and told the kids that what they were eating for the week; surprising it didn’t bomb as much as I thought it would. You could buy yourself something fancy, but that’s more money to spend when you don’t really need to have it, especially when $74 is your budget. Besides, I like the ‘vintage decorative look’ of note paper on the fridge.
Best of luck.
