Make a Budget-Friendly and Appealing Meal Plan with these tips and a free downloadable meal plan worksheet. It can be overwhelming to figure out how to create a meal plan that works for your family. Here are step-by-step instructions that you can follow to break it down.

Steps to making a budget-friendly and appealing meal plan:

Know your family:

The best way to make an appealing meal plan is to know what your family likes and doesn’t like. Plus be aware of your schedule.

Make a list of your favorite meals, note how many times you eat out, and how many times cooking didn’t go as planned.

Recognize the ingredients or type of food you tend to cook and your family tends to enjoy. This will help you shape your meal plans. You can’t just quit everything cold turkey, so plan to allow your meal plan to include these things, even if your long-term goal is to change it.

Do you tend to use the same few cuts of meat?
Are they soups, casseroles, or crock pot meals?
What vegetables, if any do you tend towards?
What starches do you tend towards?
Are they quick and easy or more time-intensive?
Is there a specific culture of food your family tends towards (American, Southern, Italian, etc)

Know your goals:

What is the reason you are choosing to make a meal plan? Knowing your why makes doing the how much easier. Reasons include:

Reduce the budget- by meal planning you can get a hold of your budget and figure out where and how to cut some spending.

Learn how to cook better or teach your kids how to cook

Change your diet- eat more or less of certain foods

Be more organized

Have a schedule for eating out or never eating out

Less waste- by meal planning, you can get better at making sure you use as much of the food that you cook or prepare with and decrease the amount of leftovers you have to throw out!

More sit-down meals together? If you haven’t read about the benefits of eating sit-down meals as a family, you should! It will quickly become a goal.

Broaden pallets- this one is hard if a spouse or adult in the house doesn’t like a lot of food, but by meal planning, you can slowly introduce new meals, ingredients, and spices

Spend less time thinking about and cooking food

Cook less- meal planning doesn’t mean you have to cook all day every day! Your goal can be only to cook three or four days a week and thrive on leftovers.

Decide when and how you will make the meal plan:

Are you going to meal plan once a week, every other week, once a month, or even every day? It doesn’t matter, it should just be what works for you. How often and when your meal plan can change based on life circumstances but you should do your best to figure out when you’re going to be intentional with this.

It could be after devotions, during a family meeting, on Sundays after lunch, while you’re cooking dinner, etc. When would be the most convenient for your meal plan? Let us know in the comments below!

Decide where you are going to source your ideas based on your goals. Places to consider getting meal ideas from include:

Cookbooks

Family favorites (handwritten recipes in your recipe box)

Cooking shows or YouTube channels

A quick note on this. It’s easy to run headlong into this and be excited. I caution you that you should not bite off more than you can chew. If you want to learn new recipes, that’s awesome. But only do 1 new recipe a week! Remember, slow and steady wins the race!

Additionally, think about boundaries that you should set for yourself so that you don’t burn out. Boundaries include things like:

Only 1 new meal a week

I will only spend 30 minutes browsing new recipes

I will not spend more money than I have allotted just to make a specific meal

Know your budget and keep track of it

The most common budget recommendation for groceries is 10 – 15 percent of your monthly income. Do you fall in this range?

Before you fully decide on a budget, keep all your grocery receipts and record what you spent. Also, if you eat out, keep those receipts too. I know that in budgeting, dining out is technically a different category, but I like to look at how much we spent on food overall in a month. Evaluate how much food you threw out or didn’t use.

Currently, we spend around 5% of our monthly income on groceries. Also, this is not a budget that will stay the same every month. One month you may have lots of company or a holiday or you may be hosted by others for meals. Evaluate that each time that you go over your grocery budget.

Stick With the Plan and Work on Skills

Give yourself grace that you’re not going to be perfect but plan to keep improving. Here are skills and ways to keep improving or help your kitchen function better.

Take notes of meals that work and don’t work. Have an app on your phone or plan to take notes in your cookbooks or our free printout!

Invest in some good cookbooks or good cooking channels. I believe that learning how to cook well is the number one key to a successful meal plan. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a book that completely changed how I cooked!

Write down meals that you like from Pinterest or create a new board called “Tried and loved” and transfer those pins over

Purge your pantry/freezer/spice cabinet/fridge- get rid of old stuff, things you don’t use, take notes of things that you’re out of, and rotate things that are getting old or you want to use to the front. This will help you to decide if recipes are worth trying based on whether or not your family likes or uses the required ingredients.

Check out some of our Kitchen Tips and Pantry Recipes!

Let us know in the comments below which of these steps is the hardest for you to do. And don’t forget to sign up to our e-mail list to get the free printout of our Make a Budget-Friendly and Appealing Meal Plan Guide.

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