Magic Meal Planner

When you’re not used to cooking or buying so many fresh vegetables (as you’ll find in the menus at Magic Meal Planner) it can seem that this way of doing things will be waaaay expensive!  But that is simply not true.  Although the grocery lists provided here can look to be quite long because of all the different herbs and vegetables in the recipes here, each item is relatively inexpensive, especially when you compare them to the cost of many convenience foods.  Overall, buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is much, much cheaper than buying the pre-packaged stuff.  And it is many, many times cheaper than restaurant food.

Doing things this way will also save you money in a couple of other ways.  First, if you cook just about all of your dinners, you’ll soon find that you don’t need to buy as many snacks or lunch items.  You’ll always have healthy, wholesome, delicious leftovers in the fridge or freezer to eat instead. That’s less you have to buy at the grocery store and more money in your pocket.  You’ll also hardly ever eat out, which can save tons of money that most families spent over and above their grocery budget.

Second, since you will tend to use the same basic ingredients over and over again, just putting them together in new and different ways for different recipes, you’ll be able to stock up on many of these items when they go on sale.  Where today you might spend $2 on a single can of tomatoes, they might be on sale next week for $1.  You buy a bunch of them at the sale price and the next time you make something with canned tomatoes you have cut the cost in half.  Even if your grocery bill goes up when you first start this, it will eventually go back down again as you build your supply of pantry items. And the money you save by not eating out all the time will more than make up for the small increase to begin with.

More money saving tips coming soon!