Summer Budget Meals – Meal Planning
When I was in college, I was on an extreme budget. I was taking out student loans and worked forty hours a week at a daycare making $5.15 an hour to make ends meet. I was especially excited when I received my first – drumroll please – $.05 raise. Making an extra $.40 a day really helped out with the bills. (haha)
After one year I left the dorms and the “meal plan” I had grown accustomed to was left back in Trout Hall. For the first time in my life, I had to start buying groceries on my own. The budget for my weekly groceries was a little less than $20 a week and that included everything. How did I make it work? At the time, I shopped at Wal-Mart and bought the same thing every week. Occasionally, my cousin would go shopping with me. I knew what the exact total would be when we arrived at the checkout and my cousin found this hilarious.
This was my first experience with meal planning. I wasn’t as organized as I am now, but I pretty much ate the same thing from week to week and stuck to a budget.
The college years were rough but I am now an adult and have experienced what it is like to make a decent salary. Nonetheless, I continued to use my frugal ways to budget for groceries and other areas of my life. However, since I made more my budget was higher than $20 a week for groceries. Funny enough, I still had a good idea of what my grocery bill would be when I passed through the checkout because I allocated myself a certain amount of money for food and household items and used meal planning.