I am SUPER Excited to share this new 2 Week Meal Plan with you because I have gotten so many questions about meal planning and How to Make a Meal Plan. This is something I’m passionate about because I really believe Planning your meals is one of the Quickest ways to save money! It doesn’t matter what your budget is, if you have a plan going into the store then sticking to your shopping list is so much easier and you’ll avoid all those extra impulse purchases.
Today I am sharing a Full 2 week Meal Plan for Dinners with you, this is the plan I made for my family about a week ago and I tracked all my prices (At Walmart) for you and created a Shopping list along with all the recipes you will need so you have a complete 2 week plan!
How to Create Your Own 2 Week Meal Plan:
If you are new to meal planning make sure you check out How to Make a Meal Plan & our Free Printable Meal Plan!
These are great resources for creating your own Menu Plan and Shopping list from your favorite recipes! You can use this as a guide and the free printable worksheets to create your own if you’d like to make your own menu plan and shopping list. (TIP: If you create 2-3 of these you could easily save and reuse the menus and shopping lists)
Here’s how to use this 2 Week Meal Plan:
1. Download & Print the Menu, Shopping List and Recipes!
2. Go Shopping! All my prices are based on Walmart’s Shelf Price – I actually used some coupons, shopped at Aldi’s too and more so my actual cost was less than is shown, but even without coupons you can get what you need for around $85 for 2 full weeks (Including side dishes, etc.)
3. Follow the recipes. All my recipes are Kid Approved, I have a 6 year old and a 4 year old so there aren’t many fancy dishes :) Just simple things my family loves that I hope you will love as well!
That’s it! Super Simple, all the work is done for you!
A Few Notes:
I thought I would go ahead and give you a few things to pay attention to, hopefully this helps answer some of your questions:
Assumed Ingredients – There’s a short list of Assumed Ingredients under the Shopping List if you don’t have any of these things on hand then you may need to buy them but I figured these were items most people already have.
Pre-Cooking – One of the things that makes my life SO MUCH Easier is Prepping my meals. I always cook my hamburger meat when I first get it home from the store, then divide it into 6 Small bags. Each Bag will be for 1 recipe. Typically I get about 2 cups in each bag so that’s what each recipe calls for. I also freeze my meat in the quantities I need so that I can pull out one bag each morning to thaw! This makes Cooking so much easier!
Shared Items – I always try to make the best use of my time and ingredients! You’ll notice that some recipes call for similar ingredients, or for you to save part of the recipe for another meal. It’s a great way to utilize items completely and save money at the same time! All of these are noted at the bottom of each recipe.
Meals – I’m not going to lie, these are not all the most healthy recipes, and my kids don’t have any allergies so this is what works for us, this is a typical week in the life of our family so I’m just sharing what has worked for us with you, I know it won’t work for everyone but hopefully it gives you an idea of how you can use items multiple times to save money and how meal planning in general will save you money.
Prices – I live in Northwest Arkansas, All the prices are current prices at my Walmart or Aldi if you walked into the store to purchase the ingredients. I had Most of the Items already on hand that I had purchased with coupons, things like Taco Shells, Taco Seasoning, Pasta, Pasta Sauce, etc. all go on sale all the time, I always stockpile these items so if you’re using coupons and stockpiling you’ll be able to accomplish this menu for even less. My goal was to provide a resource that people just starting out could use to save money and learn to love menu planning. Please keep in mind that prices will vary by location so your actual cost may be higher or lower.
Number of Meals – My family doesn’t typically eat at home every night of the week. We have about 1 night a week we eat out and one night we eat with Family since all our family lives locally. So this menu and plan will last us closer to 3 weeks. I didn’t place meals on days of the week for that reason! If you don’t eat at home every night that’s completely OK you can adjust this to a 15 day plan (5 meals per week for 3 weeks) by doubling one of the recipes really fast!
Make sure you check out our Saving Money Blog and also our How to Coupon Page for more tips, tricks and videos on saving money and using coupons.
Make sure you Follow Me on Pinterest!
