When my oldest 2 were in diapers, hubby and I needed to shave our budget a bit. I needed to save my sanity by creating a diner routine, so I made a resolution to begin planning. I asked John to give me a couple hours at the end of each month to let me alone with the computer to plan a monthly menu/grocery list. We did our grocery shopping once a month with the exception of produce and dairy. This prevented impulse buys during multiple shopping trips while also helping me to know when to start dinner so that my family didn't have to turn to this for lack of poor planning.
That year was hard to begin something new, HOWEVER, dinner times were prepared, money was saved and and the following years made all that work pay off! I loved the next year because I would use the exact same menus as the previous year. Fortunately I had a (now obsolete) program that let me plug in the following year in the same month and voila last years menu would be current with the click of the mouse! I could 'recycle' my effort year after year and not have to plan all over again! This was done on a very OLD computer with an obsolete program for current operating systems so transferring all that work has not been possible. While I have kept this very old computer just for these menus, I have not had it plugged in for years. For a long while, I hoped I could find a current software with the same capabilities, but after coming up empty after some time, I kind of gave up on the effort to be organized again. Due to this lack of UMPH, meal planning has not been what it could be, ergo saving money hasn't been as efficient!
In an effort to become a better steward and to not live according to chaos, I finally set out on the pursuit to find a template that I could download much like the previous one I described. I was SO HAPPY when I found this little gem that is going to make my life a tad more efficient! While searching through the world wide web I finally found what I was looking for so I thought I would share. This is an EXCEL worksheet so it will only work for people with this software.
http://download.cnet.com/Excel-Calendar-Template/3000-2077_4-10346449.html
The download is absolutely free. Once I downloaded the program file, I had to save a copy to my documents folder (It automatically saves it to your temporary file folder otherwise). Then I used the 'save as' feature to save a copy for each month of the year and labeled accordingly (January menu, February menu, ect). For those of you detail folks........ with the year change, dates and days change with the changing of the year. So there is just a tad bit of cutting and pasting when you change the year to make the meals fall on the actual calendar days, but to me this is minimal planning rather than redoing the whole thing or winging it! ENJOY planning!
For those of you curious about meal planning I do have some documents that I can send out through e-mail of what I used to make it easier on us. Just let me know if you would like a copy by sending me an e-mail to jtmabpark@msn.com with the subject MENU PLANNING.
