Do you struggle to stay on budget with your groceries? Are you meal planning?
If you aren’t meal planning, well that’s a great place to start. But if you are, and you still are struggling because of food prices, it could be time to take a look at your meal planning method. Start at your house, look in you fridge, freezer, pantry, cabinets, fruit cellar, wherever you have food!
Now is the time to make a master list if you find you are wasting food you bought, or if you have an overwhelming amount stored. If you’re like me and don’t have too much stored, it’s probably okay to just make mental notes and write out your dinners.
Once you know what you have, you can search allrecipes.com with ingredients you have on hand and find recipes to fit. Using what you have on hand can leave room in your budget to now go shop sales. Pull up the ad for where you are shopping, this doesn’t work at Walmart really, but many other stores have rotating weekly or biweekly sales. By restocking from sales, you are creating a system that allows you to hopefully stay on budget!
Walmart doesn’t have sales, but it does have a few things that are generally a pretty good price. If you are thinking well I have to go grocery shopping because I have no food storage, these are items that Walmart is going to have decent deals on even right now. Chicken leg quarters (found in the Walmart app for .82/lb!), pork loin roast (avg $2.47/lb), rolls of sausage (avg $2.32/lb), oatmeal (avg 9.5 cents/oz), frozen veggies ($1/12oz).
Check the meat sections for yellow tags- yellow tags are on meats close to their sale by date, overstocked meat, or meat that doesn’t look as fresh as others. Yellow tag meat is safe. Pay attention to use buy dates and cook up or freeze before. Check the clearance end caps, and look for bakery markdowns to stretch your budget.
Even with 2022 prices, there is some hope for your grocery budget.
