Meal Planning Awareness Exercise

In order to save yourself some precious time and money, you want to keep this simple principle in mind: Make the most with what you have.

If you’re able to stick to this idea, your meal planning will be successful and you will be amazed at home much money, time and energy you used to spend on something as simple as lunch and dinner.

The first awareness exercise I recommend on doing is figuring out how much time you currently spend on meal planning. Here is the conclusion we came to when we started looking at the numbers:

Every day, we spend at least 10 minutes in the morning to figure out what to bring for lunch. Then same for dinner so another 10 minutes there.

Week’s total: 140minutes

Twice a week, we need to run to the store because the sour cream isn’t “best before” anymore and because we ran out of eggs. 35 minute trip including round trip and shopping time only.

Week’s total: 210minutes

At least 4 times a week, we need to thaw some meat or fish which adds another 10 minutes to our prep time that could have been avoided if we’d planned our meal in advance.

Week’s total: 250minutes

So a total of 4 hours and 20 minutes a week of our time are invested in our current meal planning process. Note that I didn’t count in here the grocery shopping trip because this varies for everyone but you can definitely add it in there once you figure out how long it used to take you and how long it takes you with your meal planning list. If you already shop using a list, you can simply add this amount of time to your total – just remember to add in it again at the end of the process.

Big picture snap-shot: that’s 16 hours and 40 minutes a month, over 8 days a year – that’s more days than some people go on holiday each year.

We haven’t even begun talking about dollars and cents yet. Because money is a trickier and much more personal topic, we’re not going to dig right in there at this point but if you’d like to do the same exercise to figure out the extra money you are currently spending, here are a few things you can include:

• Cost of pre-packaged/frozen bought to save time.
• Gas for those last minute grocery store trips.
• Last minute fast-food meals.
• Food you toss out because you didn’t use before the expiry date or left too long on the bottom of your freezer.

Now that you have those magic numbers, keep them handy for the first weeks of your meal planning when it seems like such a pain... or every time you’re tempted to order take out. You can even write them on a sticky note and keep it on your fridge door as a friendly reminder of how much money and time you’ll save. Pick a goal – it can be anything from a new art class you want to take or a new purse you’ve been eyeing and figure out how long you need to meal plan to be able to attain this goal.

Next step, we are going to inventory everything you have in the house. Well... not everything... just food stuff.