Monthly Meal Plan on a Budget: Less Than $100 for Dinners for a Family of 4 (2024)

If you are in need of a monthly meal plan on a budget, you have come to the right place! This meal plan was born straight out of laziness and has been amazing at keeping us on budget and out of fast-food lines when we have no energy to meal plan. Real-talk, this may not be the right plan for you, but if you are looking for a quick fix that will allow you to meal plan in less than 5 minutes you may have just found your golden ticket.

This monthly meal plan on a budget is definitely for you if:

• You are looking for a super easy way to start meal planning for the first time.
• You are trying to seriously cut your grocery budget.
• You have zero time to meal plan and want something you can accomplish in less than 5 minutes.

This monthly meal plan on a budget is definitely NOT for you if:

• You need tons of variety in your menu.
• You have an unlimited food budget and have no need to save on groceries.
• You are trying to be super healthy or have diet limitations.

Full disclosure, this meal plan is cheap, boring and not at all health conscious…oh and there’s meat. BUT, if you are looking for a monthly meal plan on a budget that you can accomplish quickly, with minimal effort and not a lot of cash, you have found the right plan (it is even 2-year-old approved)!

If you are totally new to meal planning, make sure you check out Meal Planning for Beginners: 6 Reasons to Start Meal Planning Today.

In my home, when we have zero time to meal plan, we have zero wiggle room in our food budget and we just don’t care what we eat that month, this is our go-to plan. We call this our “bare bones” meal plan.

This BASIC meal plan will give you one month of dinners for a family of four for less than $100.

All of my prices are based on my personal shopping at Aldi (in Wisconsin). Included in this plan is a calendar with the meals filled in and the shopping list.

Get your fully planned Monthly Meal Plan on a Budget Calendar print out + Shopping List FREE by signing up below!

Why is this a bare bones meal plan?

To make this no-brainer meal plan, we pick out 6 extremely basic and CHEAP meals. These are meals my husband can also cook that don’t require much effort or skill. We call Friday nights our leftover night which saves us one day of cooking. If we don’t want leftovers then we can have a PB & J or something along those lines. Eating out is NOT an option.

We assign one meal to each day of the week and then repeat this for 4 weeks. Get it? Seriously, no effort goes into this. It takes us two minutes to list 6 meals and give them a day of the week. Then we just do this every single week. See where boring comes in?

Now don’t panic. I’m not telling you to do this every month (you can if you want to, but even I would get bored with that), but for certain times when you are just burnt out on life, this makes meal planning so easy!!

Now, because you are having the same 6 meals 4 times, your grocery list will be completely simplified and take you ¼ of the time to write it compared to your usual list. My grocery list for the meals does not include the basics like milk, etc. It only includes what you need for the meals so keep this in mind when you are doing your grocery shopping. Also, these are only dinners, you will still need to take care of breakfast and lunch for your family.

I strongly recommend you shop at Aldi for the groceries as they are cheapest there. My prices are based on my most recent trip to Aldi a few days ago. With this specific meal plan, you should be able to purchase everything for right around $100. Score!

The only effort you need to put into this entire plan is actually sticking to it. This WILL save you tons of money on food if you follow through with it. When we decide to have a bare-bones month we are agreeing to not even bring up eating out.

You have to commit to sticking to the meal plan otherwise you are going to completely blow your grocery budget. Once you have tried this, you can start to tailor it to your family’s tastes. You can come up with your own ‘“bare-bones” meal plan for a month.

Ready to get started?

Plan a month of meals and have a grocery list done in 30 seconds or less! Get your FREE Monthly Meal Plan on a Budget (for a family of 4) + Grocery Shopping List by signing up below.

Of courseyou could! It’s crazy the amount of money people can actually save.

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