3. Weekly Reusable menus

Once we make our weekly menus, if we save them for later use, we eventually NEVER have to plan it again! Like EVER! And after we have several week long menus and have the variety we want for each season, we just repeat them each and every year! How great is that?

All we need to do then is adjust our menus as our family grows and shrinks or if we want to switch out one recipe for another. Can you just imagine how many hours we could save doing this over our lifetime?! Shouldn't some of that effort planning those menus start paying us time back so we can enjoy our families a bit more? 

Have you caught my vision yet? Are you excited to get started? I sure hope so! Doing this one thing has really helped improve my life as a mom and for my time management.

To print this form click HERE

A few tips for for getting started:

• Commit to shopping only once a week!  Why? The more we are in the store, the more we spend. Come on... tell me I'm the only one that adds unplanned junk in to my cart? Its a fact, at least for me, that I spend more, the more often I'm in the store. By committing to NOT stepping foot in the store except for on my weekly shopping day, I start to build menus with real shopping lists of what we need and use. If you know you will bot be in the store, we plan a bit better, and get use to thinking about things like bread and eggs and milk that are not in the calculations sometimes. I have a blank spot on this shopping grid for weird stuff, things like TP and shampoo that we may or may not need.
• Choose a consistent shopping day! It doesn't matter which day it is, it could be Wednesday evenings or Saturday morning at 3 am (yeah right). Having a consistent day, where you set the time on your calendar to go weekly shopping in stone is a must. This allows you to plan, to be ready. and be able to get everything you need in your given week.
• Have a target budget. In the beginning, making your menus are a bit tricky.