Two Week Meal Planners

As you can guess by now, I am a planner.  I love lists, calendars, folders in folders, and binders.  I love basically anything that will keep my life organized.  

A few months ago I found some meal planners that I loved at first sight over at Sew Much Crafting.  I loved everything about these.  I loved the design, the free space to write, the grocery list on the side.  There wasn’t too much stuff that I wouldn’t use or too many shopping categories.  It was simple and perfect.

Until…

My hubby and I took a look at our financial planning (or lack of it), and decided we needed to do some serious budgeting.  Some friends of ours went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace seminar a few years ago, bought us his book for Christmas, and have talked about how great it is to not be living paycheck to paycheck.  It all sounded great.  I skimmed the books, bought some envelopes to help me manage the money, and it stopped there.  Since then, we’ve had to purchase another car, we’ve added my student loans, we’ve put a second child into pre-school, and we’re still making the same money on one paycheck.  Something had to give.

So – Billy and I have done some life changing.  The first thing we did was work on our health.  He needed to lose 25 lbs he’d gained since our wedding, and I needed to lose (muffled number) lbs. that I had gained with fertility meds (such a love/hate with those things), and two pregnancies.  We installed an app on our phones called Lose It to easily count calories, and we started doing Shawn T’s T25 workout every day!  In 8 weeks, he’s lost 25 lbs. WOOT!  WOOT!  (Way to go, Babe!)  And I’m down 20 lbs.  (Pat on the back.)  When we started doing this, our grocery lists and our budget for groceries changed.

The next thing we did was to limit our groceries.  We were going to the store 2 times (minimum) a week.  We would go to a bulk store on the weekends, and then pick up the little things at the grocery on another day.  We were spending $200-$300 a week at the grocery.  Insane!  I decided that I needed to plan our meals around the hubby’s payday.  This way, I can pull out our grocery money, make our meal plan, get exactly what we need and nothing more.  We can be done shopping until the next payday.

This is where the meal planner I had fallen in love with failed.  I tried to make it work, and it did, but it made me crazy.  I had to draw a line down the middle to make 7 days into 14 days.  Not sure how you guys are paid, but he gets his checks twice a month on the same days each month.  Sometimes it falls on a Friday.  Sometimes he’s paid on a Wednesday.  It just depends.  That put a kink in my nice neat meal planner, as well.  I had to quit my cute planner.

All that to tell you, I’ve reinvented the lovely planner that I found over at Sew Much Crafting.  I didn’t want to change it too much because I loved it.  But I needed it to be two weeks worth of planning.  I also needed it to not be day specific.  Remember this is for my own planning and for grocery shopping.  When my kids are old enough to read and ask what’s for dinner, I will make a cute board and put our meals on it.  Right now they only like to eat 5 things anyway – hotdogs, mac-n-cheese, meatballs, noodles, and peanut-butter & honey sandwiches.  Rinse and repeat!

I made 14 different planners.  Well, it’s the same planner, just 14 different colors.  As always, everything here on This Little Pig Stayed Home is free for your use.  Please be sure to link back to our page and share the love.  I’ve included pictures of all the colors below.  To download them, click on the color you like.  The PDF you download will not have the large watermark that you see in the picture.  That’s just for the world wide web… and Pinterest.  (Feel free to pin them!)

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Hope you enjoy!

Heather