My first step is to sit down and look at my family calendar. If you don't have one master calendar for your family, I encourage you to start one. Mine is a paper calendar that I keep on my refrigerator. I have a line for each family member, and one for each meal. Now, ours is admittedly more complex, because of our custody arrangement - which also factors into my meal planning, but I'll get into that more later. I write down all the special events that we may have that month, and how that factors into our meal plan. For instance, we have a special event at church this month where we will be eating pizza for dinner. So, I don't need to plan a meal for that day. Write down whatever you need to do that month, where everyone is going to be, etc. so that you get a good idea of what your family will be doing.
Next I figure out how many meals I need to make. This is where custody tends to complicate things. I have my kids 50% of the time. So there are two weeks out of the month that I need to plan on making actual breakfasts, packing school lunches, having after school snacks, and family-sized dinners. You'll notice on my meal plan that I have categories like "Kid Lunches at Home" - those are the weekends when I have my kids and like to actually make a family meal for lunch for us to eat. Then there are "Adult Lunches" which are all the delicious things that my husband and I want to eat on the weekends that we don't have the kids.
Below is a picture of my "working list" where I make my notes. Because I am the way that I am, I also type up my list if I have time to make sure that I don't forget anything.
I do not coupon like most people do - I don't go through the paper and clip things out, and I don't compare prices on things at other stores. I just use my Fry's app and will add digital coupons that they have to my shopper card. I do not shop sales. I do not go to multiple grocery stores. I go to Fry's and buy everything because I like to get the Fuel Points. My goal each month is to keep my grocery budget under $500. If I am feeling particularly motivated I will try to keep it under $400. That includes groceries, vitamins, things like shampoo/conditioner/body wash/shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, cleaning supplies, paper products. It does not include medicine purchases (monthly prescriptions) or pet supplies - our dog has some serious food allergies and has his own line item for dog food because he is ridiculous.
Several people have asked what we do about produce, and how do we eat produce all month long. I buy a ton of fresh fruit and veggies, but I also buy frozen. When I get home from grocery shopping, I chop some (onions, peppers) and freeze what I can blueberries/grapes/etc. The frozen fruit will be put into lunch boxes - because they will thaw by the time lunch comes around, used as an after school snack, tossed into yogurt or a smoothie for breakfast. We eat a lot of salad and fresh seasonal vegetables for the first two weeks, and then use our frozen stock for the last two weeks. It just takes a bit of tweaking your meal plan to make sure that you are using recipes in the beginning that call for fresh vegetables, and making things like crock pot meals or soups or casseroles in the last half of the month so that you can use your frozen goods.
We are not huge dairy drinkers, so we rarely buy more than a gallon of milk a month, and even some months that doesn't get used up.
When we buy things like bread, tortillas, English muffins, butter, cheese, lunchmeat - we buy in bulk and put it in the freezer. Same with our meat - I buy a lot of chicken, portion it out into what I will need for each meal (chop, slice, or flatten beforehand) and then freeze it. Don't forget to label your frozen meat with information like when it was frozen, what it is, what meal it is for - so that you don't get it mixed up.
Here is how my plan is so ridiculously easy: after I have a list of all the meals that I am going to be making, I write down every single thing I will need to make that meal. That way I end up with a very comprehensive grocery list. Next I open the Fry's app on my phone and in the "Shopping Cart" section, I add everything on my grocery list. This gives me a very accurate guess as to what my final grocery bill will be, and what's great is that it does not include the coupons that I have loaded to my card, so my bill is usually lower. It also tells me what aisle the items are on, so I can just use it as a list, aisle by aisle, to go through and grab what I need.
It really is pretty simple, and I am sure that I could add some steps in to save even more, but right now this is what has been working for us. This month's grocery total was $302.
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