Meal Planning

Problem: When I was researching how to eat more healthy, I realized that a lot of suggestions for eating healthy involve eating lots of fresh fruits and veggies, and many recipes call for fresh ingredients. I love fruits and veggies, but as everyone on a budget knows, fresh ingredients are expensive, and they go bad quickly. 

Solution: The way I solved this problem is meal planning. Meal planning is awesome, and it saves you a lot of money. Before I started planning my meals, I would just go to the store and pick out things I thought I would need that week. I would inevitably forget things and inevitably buy a lot of things I didn't need, resulting in a high grocery bill and waste when we didn't eat everything I would buy. Now I hardly have any waste, and I (almost) always stay within my budget. I personally have a $50 per week grocery budget, and when I go to the grocery store fully loaded with my list of things for the week I always come within a few dollars. Before I started meal planning, I would regularly be around $20 over budget. This does require you to sit down before you go to the store, go through your cabinets and fridge and see what you will need this week (or get in the habit of writing down things as you run out!), but the time is well worth it. It also requires you to prioritize what is most important to you. For instance, I really like apples and clementines, but buying both would have put me way over my budget. So this week I bought clementines, which will last me two weeks, and next week I can buy a few apples. Meal planning also added more variation to what we were eating because I would take the time to go through cookbooks (or let me be honest, look on Pinterest) for new recipes for the week. Then I would add those ingredients to my list. When you aren't buying things you won't need for that week, it's amazing what fresh ingredients you can buy and how much money and food you save!

Another good tip I have seen is to buy in bulk at places like Sam's or Costco. I really like this idea, but our current apartment doesn't have a pantry so we don't have room to store extra food! Something to wish for in the future :)


What I learned from meal planning is that it is possible to buy healthy fresh ingredients when you're on a budget. It just takes a little bit of planning. So that excuse that eating healthy is too expensive went right out the window