Meal Planning to Save Money

Being sponsored by a recipe site this week reminded me of something I have been trying to do and wanted to share. Meal planning.

I recently read the ebook on feeding a family of 4 for $200 a month over at Budget101.com. The idea of it seemed pretty exciting but also nearly impossible. Being a stay at home mom and having young children at home I found it was hard to stay in the price range. If I only took supper into consideration we were fine. But adding breakfast, lunch, and snacks in threw me over the budget. Even just figuring in cold cereal or warm oatmeal for breakfast and leftovers for lunch I still find myself over. I suspect this would be much easier to do during the summer when one can have a garden and cut out the costs of some fruits and vegetables. But right now it is too cold to grow much and buying fresh costs a good penny.



So I am curious if anyone else does meal planning and if they find they save money. It would seem that having a plan ahead of time would save mony from buying the "junk" foods, but I wonder how much.