Since Mia was born we decided that I would be a stay at home mom for a year or two. My job is contract work so I didn’t get maternity leave so we were a single income family of three. Moving provinces was also not cheap so we have had to be extra frugal.
Grocery shopping can be overwhelming with kids and since we started feeding Mia solids it took some trial and error to find something that worked for us.
Like I always say, there’s a million right way to do things but here I’ll show you what worked for our family.
1) Meal plan.
We found that a strict meal plan didn’t really work for our schedule but also that meal planning was essential. We found that just choosing two recipes for the week and eating them whenever worked best.
We would look at our pantry first (see tip 2) then check out some recipes. Make sure that the suggested serving size was enough to last for enough meals. Some weeks it was two and some weeks three meal recipes to get us through. If you want to cook less and don’t mind eating lots of the same things double or triple your recipe.
2) Shop from your pantry, freezer & fridge FIRST.
Before, I found that we would have an overflowing pantry, fridge and freezer. It got so overwhelming I just wouldn’t look resulting in unused useable food that eventually went bad.
On sundays before I even look at recipes I do a quick inventory of what we have then do some googling. I find our pantry is MUCH more manageable AND we usually have the makings for a recipe already!
This saves a lot of money because you’ll have to buy less. I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner.
3) Shop with cash
What inspired this was Gale Vaz Oxlade from the show Princess & Till debt do us part. We have a set budget which is 100$/week, this number will change based on your family needs.
We get paid biweekly so we take out two weeks worth of cash in our set amounts and have envelopes we put it in. We only use the cash so we can’t overspend.
All of our bills come out of internet banking but grocery as well as a few other categories are cash only.
I’m not going to lie, this was a pain in the ass at first but once we got it down it really worked for us.
These are 3 simple things that have really worked. I would love to hear if you’ve done any of these with success. I’d also love to hear if you’ve tried something differently that has really worked for you.
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