January 2020 Meal Plan — Month in Review

Housing, transportation, and food are the big three categories that make up the bulk of anyone’s budget. Getting a handle on these three costs will have the biggest impact on your ability to ramp up that savings rate.

Our food costs can sometimes sneak up on us. We spend what feels like smaller amounts regularly throughout the month, but when you add it all up at the end, the total dollar amount can sometimes be surprising — and not in a good way.

One of the things that has been the most helpful to me in cutting down my food costs (though it’s still a work in progress) has been meal planning.

By having a plan for what we are going to make and shopping for the week all at once, we cut down on those last-minute trips to the store (where you’re losing time and just buying stuff for one night’s dinner…and probably some snacks). It also provides clarity about what exactly we need to buy when we do make that weekly shop and can drastically cut back the nights we end up ordering in.

We used to meal plan week by week, but recently, we’ve started meal planning for the whole month at once. We started doing that before a particularly busy month because we knew once that work sprint hit, we just wouldn’t have the energy to plan our week’s meals.

We don’t necessarily stick to the plan perfectly and we end up moving things around a good bit depending on how many leftovers we end up having (and other things that come up). But creating a calendar of meal ideas and recipes that can last a month makes doing that weekly meal plan and grocery list a whole lot simpler. Plus, it shows us which days we already plan to go out to eat, which has helped us make better decisions about impulse take-out halfway through the week.

Here I’ve broken down what we ate in January and I’ve linked out to the recipes we used, where available.

Dashes represent meals that we skipped (not a great practice, but sometimes the day just gets away). Meals that say “work” are free meals included in some kind of work event.

Week 1: