Five Tips for Planning Meals on a Budget

Creating delicious, nutritious meals does not have to mean spending a fortune. For sure, you can go all out and create cordon bleu style food that costs an arm and a leg, but for most of us, daily prepping and cooking needs to equal quick and budget-friendly meals.

Meals on a budget don’t have to be any less tasty though. We’ve created an easy five-step plan to create healthy meals on a budget that the whole family will love – even your fussy mother-in-law!

How to Plan Meals on a Budget?

Here are our top five tips for planning meals on a budget; meals that are packed with flavour, easy to prepare and will have the kids and your spouse asking for seconds.

Shop Local

Finding a local butcher or green grocer can save you money. When you shop at more local, smaller outlets you can find some really good bargains on certain cuts of meats and fresh produce. Become friendly with your local shop owner and let them know that you’re shopping on a budget, they would probably be more than happy to help you shop within your price range.

Shop Seasonal

Shopping for fresh produce like vegetables and fruits that are in season can be cheaper. Even though many supermarkets offer certain produce all year round, the price tends to go up on these items when they are out of season because the cost to produce them gets higher too. Choose recipes that contain produce that is in season and you’ll find you’ll spend less.

Menu Plan

The experts will tell you that if you want to eat healthy and, on a budget, the best way to do so is to plan your meals. When you don’t have a meal plan for the week, it’s easy to make choices like getting takeaways or cooking something less healthy after a long day at work and with the kids. We recommend sitting down on a Sunday evening and planning your meals for the week, making a shopping list at the same time of the ingredients and products you need for that week.

Stick to Your List

Once you’ve planned out your menu and shopping list, make sure you stick to it. Don’t be tempted to get extras or things you don’t need when shopping. This way, you’ll be able to stay within your weekly budget and never have too much “stuff” in the fridge that could inevitably go off and be thrown away, wasting valuable money.

Less is More

When choosing budget recipes, we recommend choosing recipes that have five ingredients or less. Also try incorporating vegetarian meals into your meal plan once or twice a week to keep the cost of buying expensive meats down and enable you to create more low-calorie meals on a budget. These kinds of recipes will keep the price down and also not be too time consuming to prepare and cook.

How to Make Cheap Meals on a Budget?

When it comes to family meal ideas on a budget, over here at What’s for Dinner, we’ve made choosing yummy, flavourful recipe ideas pretty easy. We’ve put together a list of simple, affordable, delicious recipes made with inexpensive ingredients and underrated cuts of meat to help you feed your family in a way that’ll keep your back pocket happy too.

Browse our Budget Recipes now.