Bi-Weekly Menu Planning and Grocery Shopping

Today is preparation day.  Preparation for this week's shopping and menu planning.  I don't always do it this far in advance (2 days) but I'm trying to find ways to lower our grocery budget without spending all day at it.  (I have better things to do, and I'm thinking that most other parents do to.)  I was looking for coupons to use this week at Winco Foods, because I was informed by some wonderful ladies at church last week that Winco Foods is cheaper, even, than where I have been shopping.  They had some great free coupons in last week's circular, but I didn't make it to the store, since it was my off-week.  I'm hoping to find some good deals in this weeks circular.

Here's the deal.  I generally shop every two weeks, but more often than not, end up back at the store on  my off weeks for things like milk and bread.  I want to try to remedy that.  For my bi-weekly shopping trip, I usually spend $250-$300 for a family of 6.  I don't really know if that's good or bad, but it's what I spend, and it seems pretty good to me, since I used to budget $1000 for groceries every month.  This means I've managed to figure out how to save $400-$500 per month.  Not too shabby!!  So while my menu list and grocery list are not yet made, I wanted to share some of the sites I came across that do not require any kind of membership fee, though you may have to sign up for the site itself.  I recommend having an email account just for this sort of thing.

First off is a site that not only lists the ad prices for all stores, but she also participates in $5 dollar dinners.  I browsed a few of the menu plans, and they looked promising.  The site is Northwest Coupon Lady and while the site is best for those of us that live on the West Coast and even better for those that live in the Northwest, I'm sure there are some links and information that can be used my everyone.  I also found a page linking to money saving sites for every store you can think of, so if you have a particular store you like to shop at, and would like to see the deals available there, here's the page with a list of links: BeCentsAble, LLC.

Since I'm still new to this, and don't want to go crazy just giving you a bunch of links, I'll stop at those for today.  Hope they help you in your efforts to budget and meal plan!  Be blessed and happy shopping!