How you can create a meal plan on a budget

Belinda Robins challenged herself to feed her family of four for $200 a month.

She says the only way she was able to achieve it was through meal planning.

Belinda, from Port Macquarie in NSW, runs a blog called Mummy on a Budget, and has been meal planning since 2017.

For some, it may seem like a constraint to know what you are going to cook every night, but for many it is not only liberating, it makes good financial sense, too.

Essentially, a meal plan is plotting your meals in advance using a simple template. It means you know what you are going to eat, and what you need to buy days, if not weeks, in advance.

So what are some of the best ways to meal plan when you are operating on a budget?

Plot your meals and plan your shopping

Once she had plotted three meals a day for a month Belinda wrote a shopping list.

"I bought everything up front to try and make sure I could do it for under $200 and I noticed a difference to our budget immediately," she says.

"While I still had to buy some bread, milk and a bit of fruit and veg later in the month, I had spent the bulk of that $200 in week one which then meant I didn't have to really buy anything after that, so any money I would have spent on food went straight into the bank.

"And by only spending $200 a month I could afford to have a splurge night occasionally."

Amy Smyth, from the Huon Valley in Tasmania, has been meal planning since she moved out of her family home and says she would definitely be worse off financially without it.

"I work with people who go to the shops to buy their dinner every day," she says.

"That would do my head in.

"It would cost me so much money because I would go in to buy $10 of dinner groceries and come out with $60 worth of groceries because I saw something else."

The health benefits of planning meals

Dietitian Eleni Georgiou says meal planning can make sense from a health point of view too.

"There is nothing worse than coming home and trying to think about what is for dinner because the pressure is there and we that can impact on our mental health, too.

"The undesirable choices sneak in when we are short of time.

"It is better for our lifestyle, less stress and gives us a chance at creating healthy meals.

"You can plan your meals around timing and shopping lists and you can make sure you are getting a healthy meal."

How can you make it fit your budget?

It's one thing to think about shopping on a budget, but how do you know that you will have enough food?

"I started with thinking about what I would like to eat, and working out the average cost of the recipes," Belinda said.

"Then I just revised and revised and revised.

"In the first month we ate interesting food — we had always had spag bowl, but we switched it to lentil bolognaise.

"The first time I did this it took hours. I wrote down all the ingredients looked up the costs of them on supermarket websites."

She also spent time searching for cheap recipes online.

Are specials helpful?

"I don't shop with the specials guide for a very good reason: We will buy more," Amy says.

"Unless you are doing a meal plan based on those specials and you shop for that, it can work as a negative."

Many outlets don't announce their specials in advance, and some of the larger stores do not release catalogues at all, they display the sale items in store only.

This can make it difficult to meal plan around specials, though if a staple food of your meal plan is on special, and it is within budget to stock up, why not?

Use a simple planning template

The meal plan itself can be as simple or as complicated as you like.

"I found out about meal planners from other mummy bloggers," says Belinda.

"I had a look and they didn't really meet my needs because some of them you had to buy the book and I didn't want to spend $30 or $40 to buy the book not knowing if it would be suitable for me in the first place."

She uses a spreadsheet and puts three meals a day in there.

For Amy, it is a whiteboard at home, and only for dinners.

"I write what we are eating every night and that also depends very much on our lives.

"If we're at athletics that's an athletics night [dinner] and it's something different.

"I write who's cooking and it is there as a central hub in the kitchen.

"We try new things often, because otherwise we would eat the same 10 things until we die.

"But our needs are based on ease of preparation and what is happening that day."

What happens when you just want takeaway?

Sometimes, even if you know what you are cooking, it is easier to blow the budget and get a takeaway.

While meal planning can free up some extra money to splurge on a pizza, there are other fast and easy options that won't blow the budget.

"We have fakeaways," says Amy. "Fake takeaway we make ourselves, like a burger on the barbie, or a three-step curry paste.

"We sometimes dip out of the [rest of the] budget in terms of food and it is about being able to roll with it.

"I budget for food I like I budget for everything [so if we do splurge] I take it from money we would use for something else."