All our married life, we’ve tried to stick to a budget. We do pretty well in most areas – most of our bills are very predictable. But there are two things that get us every month: groceries and eating out.

We love food. But we aren’t very good meal planners. So most evenings find me clueless as to what I’m going to make for dinner. So I call my husband and ask him what he’d like, and then I usually ask him to stop at the store and pick up a few ingredients, as the baby is napping at that time of day so I can’t go myself.

Or, we eat out. That might mean getting a pizza or finding a coupon for a nearby restaurant. And oh do we love to eat out! It’s an addiction for us. Plus, my husband often ends up eating out for lunch because we’re not that good at having “lunchy” foods in the refrigerator.

Add into the mix that we also purchase extra things for the baby – vegetables to make into baby food and jarred fruits. We’ve found many ways to cut costs in this category, but it still adds up.

And there goes our budget. Straight into the red.

We’re determined to rein in our spending, pay off debt, and put more into savings. So this month we’re trying a new plan.

Sunday afternoon, we sat down and chose a meal for each night of the week, things we can easily make leftovers of so we have more lunch options than just peanut butter and jelly. We made a grocery list based on the meal calendar. Now, I know what’s for dinner every night of the week. I won’t be calling my husband asking him to go to the store for me. Which also gets him home from work sooner! Bonus!

Each dinner will easily produce leftovers for lunches, or can be multiplied if we have company. It’s also flexible – I can move dinners around to accommodate guests or if we’re going to be out that evening.

And, we have decided we will have rice ‘n beans for dinner twice a week. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s healthy. I can make one big batch of beans in the crock-pot on Mondays and be done for the week, and each batch of rice for dinners produces leftovers so bingo, easy lunches.

So this week, our meal plan looked like this:

Sunday: French toast (you gotta have breakfast for dinner sometimes!).

Monday: Rice ‘n beans w/ salad (we also top our rice ‘n beans with lots of diced veggies).

Tuesday: Homemade pizza topped with chicken sausage (love when that’s on sale!) and veggies.

Wednesday: Shredded chicken mixed with rice, broccoli, and sautéed zucchini left over from the pizza.

Thursday: Rice ‘n beans w/ salad.

Friday: Spaghetti w/ salad.

Saturday: Turkey burgers w/ sweet potato fries.

We actually ended up having the spaghetti tonight (Thursday) as we’re having a collaboration dinner with Annjeri tomorrow night – tacos! And then Saturday we’re going over to another friend’s house for dinner, so the turkey burgers can be for Sunday’s dinner. Which works out well, since we’ll probably do next week’s shopping on Sunday so it’ll be nice to have dinner planned already.

The ultimate goal is to come in under our grocery budget this month.

Here’s hoping we make it!