How To Make a Food Budget — and Save Money Without Meal Prepping
Written by
Dawn Allcot
Edited by
Amen Oyiboke
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Many tips surrounding saving money at home advise meal prepping to get more bang for your buck. But what if you don’t like meal prepping or lack freezer space? Maybe your family refuses to eat leftovers or reheated food.
Personal finance blogger Katie Gatti Tassin, author of Rich Girl Nation, called meal prepping “depressing” on her blog. If you share those feelings, that’s reason enough to find other ways to save money on groceries. Fortunately, you can stick to a realistic food budget and save money even without meal prepping.
Track Your Grocery Spending for a Month
Before you set a realistic food budget, you have to figure out how much you’re currently spending and what you’re buying.
The USDA publishes a monthly food plan report that highlights how much an “average” family of four spends on food. For April 2025, food-at-home costs a frugal family of four a minimum of $993 per month. However, your grocery budget could cost thousands per month, depending on your family’s size and the foods you enjoy.
Tracking grocery spending for one month can help you spot trends, pinpoint “non-negotiables” for your family, and see where you can reduce costs. “It’s one of the easiest areas to trim, candidly, because it’s often far more out of control than we even realize,” Tassin wrote.
Choose Easy and Affordable Foods
Tassin opted to aim for a cost of $2 per meal per person. She manages to stick to this goal by choosing pasta with sauce, scrambled eggs, salad, cheese, and comfort foods like quesadillas or grilled cheese. It probably helps that she doesn’t cook much meat and is a petite female with lower caloric needs than many people, according to her blog.
However, no matter how much you or your family eat, you can create meals that use similar ingredients for the week, so ingredients don’t go to waste. Being able to accept some repetition in your meals can dramatically cut your food bills.
Stick To Staples
It might be fun to try new recipes, but if you’re aiming to stick to a thrifty grocery budget, avoid recipes with ingredients that are unusual, expensive or hard to find. If you’re looking for an exotic dinner, it might be more cost-effective to dine out than try to make the same thing at home with ingredients you’ll only use once.
Keep Ready-to-Eat Meals on Hand
If you aren’t meal-prepping to have easy meals available to reheat, it can leave you opening the GrubHub app after a hard day at work. Instead, plan ahead for those nights you don’t feel like cooking. Keep ready-to-eat meals available to heat up in a pinch.
Tassin recommended frozen pizza or flatbreads from Trader Joe’s. Costco’s ready-to-eat selection of pre-made foods can also last a week in the refrigerator and can feed even a large family for at least two nights.
Leave Space for Dining Out, But Not Every Night
Dining out is often a social experience, so leave room in your food budget once or twice a week to share a restaurant experience with friends, if that’s important to you. But don’t be afraid to get creative with get-togethers. An afternoon at the beach with bagels and fruit can be just as much fun, and more affordable, than a dinner at the latest hot spot. Your friends might even be relieved at the change of pace.
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