Money and food are the two topics that a lot of families talk about the most!
What are we going to eat? How much does it cost?
Those two questions go through your typical American mom’s brain at least 3 times every single day. Feeding your family is a full time job, and doing it healthfully and budget consciously is another thing all together.
Feeding your family healthy and frugal meals doesn’t have to be as complicated as you think!
I’m going to show you exactly how you can spend less than $700 a year on the food you feed your family for 4 for dinner.
$700 is not that much money. In fact, let’s break it down to see how much it would buy you if you spend it in a few convenience options:
Eating Out
If your family spends $30 every time you eat out, which is actually fairly conservative. You would only eat 23 times before you spent $700. That’s less than a month of dinners!
Pre-Packaged Frozen Foods
If you throw all health awareness out of the window and just go for easy pre-packaged frozen foods from the grocery store, you’re going to spend about $10 per meal for a family. At that rate, you will only get 70 meals before you have passed the $700 mark! Just barely over 2 months!
Meal Delivery Kits
They may be both convenient and healthy, but they are incredibly expensive! They charge about $7.50 per serving per meal. That means for a family of 4, it’s at least $29.96 per meal. Just like eating out, you’re looking at about 23 meals before you’ve gone through $700.
For my growing family, on a tight budget, none of these things are an option!
I have always meal planned and grocery shopped to save money. And let me tell you, IT WORKS!
You can read all about my grocery shopping and meal planning routine here!
A few weeks ago, I thought that there has to be a way to save even more money on our grocery bill. Then the thought occurred to me to just simplify!
Most of our grocery spending comes from meat or other more expensive parts of a meal. I thought that if I could simplify the number of ingredients I was buying to make the meals for the following 10 days, it had to save some money.
Let me tell you, it saved a lot of money!!
For 10 days, our family ate dinner made from only 5 ingredients.
We had a cycle that was chicken based, a cycle that was beef based and another that was vegetarian based. A full 30 days of dinners.
For the month, I only spent $53.32 on ingredients for dinner.
Does that seem like an error? It’s not. I’m a former math teacher and I checked the math three times. 🙂
Seriously, we only spent $53.32 for an ENTIRE MONTH of family dinners. That’s less than the cost of eating out TWO times.
Repeating these meal plans every single month, means that you’ll only spend $639.84 a year on family dinners.
That is a way to save some serious money and knock out some of your family financial goals!
Are you interested in the meal plans we used to save a ton of money?
Check them out below! I’ve even got free printable grocery lists for each 10 day plan!