Put all the meals you want on a calendar for the month! This is a frugal way to prevent splurge purchases while at the grocery store. Stick to your grocery list by planning your meals ahead of time.
Our brilliant idea was to not do just a week’s worth of menu planning, but to do an entire month. To help with that, we bought a blank montlhy whiteboard calendar.
At the beginning of each month, we arrange the magnets on the calendar make out a month’s worth of planning. The magnets are also useful if I need to change the plan for a day.
Once we have our monthly meal plan calendar ready for that month, we make a giant grocery list of everything we would need to for that month to make the food.
It takes some work to set up, but monthly meal planning has cut down on our food expenses tremendously. We’re less likely to make splurge purchases and we can stockpile on we regularly use.