Trying to eat healthy, tasty food on a budget can feel like a colossal task. Going to your local grocery store will give you a huge amount of options, but many of these are expensive and leave you feeling hopeless or like you’re missing out. Thankfully, this isn’t the case at all! It’s very possible to cook some incredible meals with good ingredients without having to spend too much per month. With some careful planning, you’ll be able to make an incredible budget meal plan. 

From careful budgeting of each ingredient to using an established meal service, there are lots of things you can do to cut costs and still eat delicious, healthy food. But what are some of the most important tips for planning meals on a budget? If you’re wondering about this, don’t panic! You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’re going to give you a list of the top 5 tips for planning meals on a budget.

5 Tips For Planning Budget Meals 

1. Plan Your Meals Around Foods On Sale

One of the best ways to plan meals on a budget is to use foods that are on sale. This can be slightly tricky, but if you come to the supermarket with a planned list of meals then you can easily find on-sale items that you can add them into. 

Make sure to choose versatile foods that you can use in a variety of meals. Often, grocery stores will put food items on sale if they are likely to go out of date soon—however, this doesn’t mean that they aren’t safe to eat. Many foods are safe to eat long after their expiry date, so you can always use them in future meals. 

2. Use A Meal Delivery Service

Meal services allow you to be delivered everything you’ll need for a healthy week of meals. Some services even allow you to choose your own meals or ingredients or even help you when it comes to specialist diets such as keto, low-calorie, or paleolithic. There are lots of meal services out there, but some are great at making the most out of healthy ingredients without exuberant price tags. 

3. Eat Vegetarian Meals

The idea that vegetarian meals are more expensive than meat-based meals is false depending on the ingredients you pick to include. For example, there are many vegetarian meals that consist of grains, legumes, eggs, and vegetables—some of the cheapest foods around! By adding one or two meatless meals to your weekly schedule, you’ll find that you’ll be able to save on a lot of money. 

4. Create Leftovers (And Eat Them!)

Leftovers are the king of making your food stretch further. Let’s say you make a big batch of creamy pasta and you can’t eat it all—this is where you’ll want to place your leftovers in a container and use them to create another meal. Often, leftovers are just as good (or even better) the next day.

 If you want to really plan your meals carefully, you can plan around leftovers. For example, in your weekly meal plan, you can plan to have leftovers of one meal the next day for lunch. If you do this, you’ll find that your costs are lowered considerably. 

5. Avoid Special Ingredients 

If you’ve ever cooked more adventurous meals, then you’ll know that special ingredients can add an awful lot to your grocery bill. There are two main ways around this so you can avoid it. The first is to only buy a tiny amount of a special ingredient. If you buy the special ingredient in bulk, you might find yourself with a lot of it and no other opportunities to use it in other meals. So then, it can be much better to avoid using it altogether. 

The second method you can use to get around this problem is to use a cheaper, substitute ingredient. Although this isn’t always possible, you might be able to do this if you take a look online or if you shop in-store carefully. Either way,. Finding a way around using expensive, special ingredients can do a lot to save you money on your grocery bill. 

Final Thoughts

So that was our list of the 5 top tips to plan your meals on a budget. We hope that this short guide has given you some ideas as to how you can make the most out of fewer ingredients per week and that you’re now a lot more confident about planning meals. We wish you the best of luck with your future meal planning and hope that you get 3 healthy, tasty meals a day!