Spending Too Much Eating Out?
I just made our meal plan for next week including breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. I created a shopping list. Then I checked our cupboards and checked off anything we already had. I organized the shopping list by aisle. Then I organized the aisles by how I would approach them in my favorite store. I assigned prices to each of the items and totaled the cost of my shopping. Then I changed a few meals to change the total cost to ensure that I stay within my assigned budget. Here’s the kicker: I did all of that in less than 10 minutes.
No Time To Plan Ahead?
Welcome to MealBoard! I’ve used MealBoard since I opened my own daycare. It’s genius. It used to take me about three hours to do all of the above every single week. I heard about MealBoard and thought for $2.99 (ios) it was worth a shot. In the first few weeks it still took me 2 hours to make meal plans and enter the meals into MealBoard. After those first few weeks though, all of my “stand by” meals were already in the system. One particularly busy week, I hadn’t had time to meal plan at all so I just repeated last weeks menu and it was done in 2 minutes. For the last several weeks, I’ve been able to do all of the above in less than 10 minutes. Now I’m on easy street! I just need to add any new recipes I want to try out and I’m done!
Do You Keep Buying Things You Already Have?
Mealboard lets you create meals (I.e. Baked Chicken Thighs, Carrots and Salad for dinner), list the ingredients, import the recipe from places like allrecipes and a few other places. You can then assign prices to the ingredients (either by the item, such as .49 for a can of corn or by the unit, such as 1.99 per pound of ground beef) and aisles in the grocery store. Head over to settings and arrange your aisles with a swipe of your finger the way you would approach them in the store so that they list in that order. Do you need to go to different stores? If you always buy flour and chocolate chips at Aldi’s but the rest of your groceries at Wegmans, no sweat! You can also assign stores to items so that you can separate the shopping list by store. If you buy extras of items, they add to your “Pantry” and the next time that item is needed it will tell you right in the shopping list how many you have in the pantry. It will give you total prices of everything you need to purchase and even separate it into the cost of whats in your cart and whats left to buy.
Automate! Make It Easy With MealBoard!
What if you use coupons? No sweat! You can add your coupons as well! What about the items that you need that aren’t in meals? Easy. You just add the contents of your stockroom (You do have a stock room right? Read more on that here) and it stores them all in the pantry. When you run low in the pantry just add it to your shopping list and you know how much to stock up on. If you aren’t the one doing the grocery shopping, no problem! You can email or print your menu plan or ingredient lists.
I’ve used this since September 2013 and love it. I can’t believe how much it can do and how easy it makes life. It’s one of the best investments you can make for $2.99!
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This sounds so handy. Is it just for iPhones? I heard of another app that can tell you which store has the cheapest price for an item. I think that would be cool too.
For right now, they only have an iPhone/iPod/iPad app. Fingers crossed that they expand. They have new update and features rolling out all the time.