I just couldn’t take it anymore. Tony tries REALLY hard, he does, to have something ready for dinner when I get home from work. The problem is, it’s just usually something that he likes and of course Ty doesn’t like it either! So, I decided it was time for a what I was calling a “Dinnertime Intervention”. I’d heard great things about planning your meals and it’s honestly something I’d been wanting to try for some time.
So, we’ve been giving it a go for the last 4 weeks or so and it’s been AWESOME! We’ve been using e-Mealz.com to aid in our effort. Every week they give you a list of 7 meals that you can choose from to plan within your week. Sometimes we use a few and then fill in our own around them, but they are an awesome starting point and they provide you a nice little grocery list as well that makes putting your grocery list together so easy.
The thing that has surprised me the most though is how much money this is all saving us! We’ve been going to the grocery story about every 2 weeks and our bill is what it was usually was for ONE week! Between this and the GroceryGame.com, we’re saving SO much more money now on our meals.
To manage all of the meals, I’ve been using one of my FAVORITE “life” tools, the Google Calendar. I use these anyway to keep track of our family activities, my business activities and now have one for our Meal Planning. The best part is, once we decide that we want to keep one of the meals for sure on our list, I set them to recur every 6 weeks. So, you only need to plan out about 6 weeks of meals and then just tweak them as you feel necessary, but the bulk of the work is done! I also have each recipe embedded in the calendar for that day so that we can quickly reference it, print it or email the day of or day before. For things that need to be taken out of the freezer the night before, I have it set to email me a reminder the night before so I don’t forget. 
So far, it’s working awesome! The eternal question of “What’s for Dinner” is no longer. Sure, we still have the occasional drive thru meal, but they are MUCH fewer and far between and it’s not only helping our pocketbooks, but our sanity as well.
Give e-Mealz a try today! 
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I might have to try that site out! What a great idea to use your Google calendar as well. But does Tony use the calendar as well? Dave never would!
No, of course Tony doesn’t use the calendar like I would hope he would, but I do then email him the the recipe when it sends me the reminder so that he can get it started during the week.