3 Ways Meal Planning Can Save You a Lot of Money on Groceries

Most people know groceries have become more expensive. In fact, the food-at-home consumer price index was up 0.7% from December of 2023 to January of 2024, and it was 1.2% higher in January of 2024 than it was a year prior.

High grocery costs are putting a big strain on many people's budgets. But there are options to reduce costs. Meal planning, or making a written plan of what you'll have for each meal over the course of the week, is one of the best ways to cut your spending at the grocery store.

Here are a few different ways making a meal plan can help you keep more of your money in your savings account, rather than spending it at the checkout counter.

1. Meal planning makes it less likely you'll need to eat out

In 2022, more than half (53.9%) of total food spending occurred at food establishments away from home. That's a shocking statistic, and it shows that Americans as a collective group may be spending just a little too much at restaurants.

But it's a lot easier not to eat out if you have a meal plan. Just think about it -- how often have you just stopped to pick up a pizza or grabbed a sandwich at lunch because you didn't really know what to eat and didn't want to think about it?

If you have a meal plan, this isn't an issue. You'll already know what you're having for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and will be a lot less likely to skip one of those meals you charted out for yourself and put on your calendar.

2. You can build your meals around coupons and sales

You can save significantly by making your meal plan after checking what manufacturer coupons are available and what is on sale at your local grocery store.

Say, for example, ground beef is on sale, with the grocery store taking $0.99 per pound off this week. If you plan two meals using ground beef instead of the more expensive ground pork that's not on sale, you could save money on both of those two meals compared with if you'd just randomly decided what to eat for dinner.

3. You're less likely to waste food if you make a meal plan

Americans throw away $444 billion worth of food every single year. In case you're really bad at math, that's a lot of money tossed in the trash.

But meal planning will have you buying ingredients only based on what you plan to cook over the course of the week. And you can plan meals to make sure you're using up all that you buy. For example, if you have to buy spinach to make a pasta dish, you can plan to have a salad with it the next day for lunch to use up the rest of the package.

Fortunately, meal planning isn't hard. You can sit down with your grocery store flyer and your computer to look up recipes, and make a list of what you want to eat. Once you get into the habit and have a nice collection of recipes you can rely on often, your life will be much easier and your credit card bills should be much smaller.