In this blog post, you’ll get an inside scoop on how I plan my meals, budget and organize my grocery shopping. It’s helped me save time, money and sanity. This is perfect for college students and those who are looking for an easy solution to meal planning.
My absolute favorite activity is grocery shopping. It might be a stressor to some, but it’s kinda therapeutic to me. It hasn’t always been this way. I used to go into a store frantically looking around for what seems good for that night. Then a day or two later, we’d have no idea what to eat for dinner and then we end up having to make another trip or we’d cave in and go to Chipotle.
Ugh, even writing about it makes me stressed lol.
But a way to make your grocery shopping as effortless and simple as possible is to create a system. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’ll show you exactly how I do it today. I hope it inspires you a teeny bit to either make your grocery shopping a little more organized or find your own way of planning.
- Every Thursday, I write out what I want to make that week (from that Friday until the next). I use a simple sheet of paper and pen. First, I brainstorm different recipes and meals. Pinterest is where I go when I need a little inspiration. Then I draw out a weekly calendar (monday, tuesday etc..), I then roughly write out what I would be eating every day at each meal (breakfast, lunch and dinner) with leftovers put into consideration. Of course, things change throughout the week and it might not stay on schedule. But at least you have an idea ( : Then I write out ALL the ingredients needed (it’s a good idea to check your fridge to see what’s in stock so you don’t double up on anything) . I try to be thorough so that we only need to make one trip a week! And that’s all for planning!
- Choose a day where you’ll grocery shop. For us, we try our best to go every Friday, if not then Saturday afternoon.
- Find a store that you know and love. For us, we shop at Aldi every week for our produce and essentials. It’s our favorite store because it’s really budget friendly and we know where everything is so our shopping time is usually around 30 minutes. If Aldi doesn’t carry a certain ingredient, we then take another trip that same day) to either a Cub Foods or Hyvee.
- Have a budget in mind. Our budget is $200 a month so about $50 per week (we also include restaurants in this too) I use Mint.com (it’s actually an iPhone app too!) to track all my spending. I don’t ever use cash, only debit. So every time I buy something, it categorizes it for me. It’s an easy way for me to keep track of where my money goes, with zero effort on my part! *bonus tip: your spending depends on you, your lifestyle, income, etc etc. For me, I follow the 50/30/20. 50% of my income goes to essentials (like food, rent, etc), 30% goes to my lifestyle (gym, personal vacations etc) and 20% goes to savings. So if you’re wondering where I got my $200 budget from, that’s how I calculated it 🙂
- Have a day where you prep ingredients. I’m not a big fan of meal prepping. But I am a big fan of having ingredients chopped, skinned, diced, washed, peeled and ready to go for the week! This make it easy for me to cook fresh meals throughout the week without burning myself out! Ya feel? But sometimes I do make a big batch on Prep Day of, let’s say chili, and that will be lunch for the whole week.
- Don’t give up. Even my system is not perfect yet and life is constantly changing but simply trying to implement and execute a meal plan can really help save time and headaches throughout your busy week!
All that’s it! I hope this helped shed some light on this intimidating topic. Planning my meals have helped me stay on track with my health goals and it’s allowed me to free up my time throughout the week for other things that need my attention. Let me know in the comments how you do your grocery and meal planning right now. And I’ll be sure to keep you updated on my grocery and meal planning system!
lotsa love,
Bella
