What's For Dinner Tonight

With the frequent job layoffs, and the skyrocketing prices of everything, one thing that can be helpful to your budget is to meal plan in advance. The cost is much higher for most items at local, smaller grocery stores. When you meal plan in advance, you can shop around for better prices.

The first step to meal planning is to have some kind of inventory of what you already have at your house in the cabinets and the freezer. For example, if you have 40 pounds of chicken (like I do thanks to a local market meat sale), a good place to start would be to find some recipes with chicken. I like to search allrecipes.com, but there are lots of recipe sites out there.

Besides saving money, meal planning adds convenience to your week. Most people are super busy during the week, and factoring in a trip to the grocery store on the way home from work just takes too much energy. The thought of having to stop for an ingredient is draining enough, but actually making the stop is too much.

The final plus to meal planning in advance is that you can control the nutrition facts in your recipe. If you are a low-carber, which I would assume you are since you are reading this, you can substitute ingredients to stay low-carb.

There are a lot of reasons to meal plan. It's not a difficult thing to do, and it saves time, money, and stress. If you don't already meal plan, hopefully this post will inspire you to do so.