This morning, we are talking about how to feed a family on a budget, especially two years ago with so much going on with Covid. It actually, on the one hand, may seem easier because most restaurants and things haven’t been opened. So you haven’t been eating out as much but sometimes it could be even more challenging because most people who were accustomed to going out and eating at restaurants or grabbing pizzas and things don’t necessarily have the will or desire to cook family meals and that kind of thing. And so, trying to feed a family on a budget can be quite taxing and daunting. But when you look at the prices and amount of money you spend eating out, and you put that in an actual budget, you would be surprised how much you could eat like kings.

There are a couple of ways that you can go about it. Either one, you can actually figure out how much money each month you currently spend on food groceries, and eating out all of that. And start with that number or two, you can do the opposite. You can say, “Okay, in our budget, we really should only be spending this amount.” For us, we had our family for years with four hundred dollars a month. That was it, I know. And this is how you do it. So many, many tools tricks, and hacks that we did that help to make that possible. 

One of the things that you do not already or have not already invested in is either a chest freezer or a separate freezer, that’s just a freezer. Not a fridge or freezer combo that you can keep in the new garage or something because with the family that little side-by-side refrigerator freezer or that top freezer, is never enough and that’s kind of one of the biggest hacks to being able to feed a family on a budget is planning ahead in planning ahead. That means a little bit of food prep. So several of us have different modalities of doing it. 

One of our friends takes one day a month and they do meal prep for the whole month, literally, like they makeup, soups, and kinds of pasta, and all this other stuff, and then they freeze it. And then throughout the month they just pull it out, warm it up and they’re good to go. So that’s how they particularly choose to do that. I didn’t necessarily do that in our family. One of the things that I found was overspending when I didn’t have a plan. 

So, for instance. If I made out a menu and I figured out, “Okay? We’re going to have hamburgers and French fries this night. We’re going to have tacos this night. We’re going to have spaghetti this night. We’re going to make homemade pizzas this night and I planned out. 

We did ours, every two weeks because when I would do grocery shopping those two weeks, schedules of meals, then I’m looking at, “Okay. What do I already have in my pantry? What do I actually need to pick up?” And sometimes what I was Finding is that I was planning meals that I did not necessarily have the ingredients for and I was often overbuying ingredients that was only a one-time thing and it wasn’t necessarily a big hit with my family.