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Do you just want to not have to worry about figuring out for dinner every single night? The part that no one warns you about being an adult, right?
In today’s episode, I’m answering 5 of your questions when it comes to the kitchen and meal planning in a way that you can be unstoppable in your finances
*There was a slight audio problem in the recording of this episode so I apologize for the scratchy sound
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Podcast Key Points
0:00 – Episode Intro
1:48 – How do You Handle Needing To Shop At Different Stores?
4:00 – Do You Just Repeat Your Menu Or ACTUALLY Plan It Every Time
6:20 – Do You Have To Meal Prep?
9:20 – Episode Sponsorship – Meal Planning Made Easy
11:00 – Using An App To Generate A Meal Plan And Shopping List
12:42 – You’re Successful One Week Only To Fall Off Yet Again…
15:19 – Challenge – Which Strategy/Question Was Most Helpful For You?
Frustrated that you aren’t making the progress that you should within your finances? Create an unshakable money mindset with the Money Mindset Mastery Checklist
Read It: Meal Planning Strategy
Save Money and Time with Meal Planning Made Easy
This episode of the Your Money Your Life podcast is brought to you by Meal Planning Made Easy, the mini course designed to help you save money in the kitchen while still enjoying the food that you love. Eliminate the struggle of having to figure out what’s for dinner every single night.
Inside Meal Planning Made Easy, we’ll create a customized system to help you automate meal planning. Eliminate forgetting an important ingredient for dinner that you needed or losing something to the back of the pantry or freezer until it’s way expired. We’ll give you a strategy for what to do when you forget to pull the meat out of the freezer because it happens to all of us.
To see all the details, simply visit aimeecerka.com/meal or text meal to 817-969-4653.
You can check out Meal Planning Made Easy now at aimeecerka.com/meal. But this year for Black Friday, I’m giving you a discount on many of my most popular programs. That way you can access just what you need to move forward and let you in on a secret. This is one of them. So get on the VIP list and be the first to know about which programs have discounts and deals receive all the details, simply visit aimeecerka.com/blackfriday.
Do you just want to not have to worry about figuring out dinner every single night? The part that NO one warned you about being an adult right?
In today’s episode, I’m answering 5 of your questions when it comes to the kitchen and meal planning in a way that you can be unstoppable in your finances. Because this is Your Money Your Life podcast where ambitious women come together to have clarity, prosperity and confidence with their money without sacrificing precious time and well-deserved fun.
Welcome to the Your Money Your Life podcast. I’m your host, Aimee Cerka.
After my husband and I faced three major financial roadblocks in the last six years. I felt like I wasn’t doing all that I could and I had let my family down. It always felt like life was a struggle like I had to work harder than everyone else. It just came easy to them. And I didn’t feel worthy of success.
Until, a coach helped me see the successes in our experiences instead of our failures. This allowed me to create and implement systems to grow our network by 200,000+ while spending time with my loved ones and on my priorities. Now I help motivated women create the happiness, family life, financial security, and long-term wealth they deserve.
If you’re ready to eliminate stress, struggle, frustration and guilt within your finances, you’re in the right place. Welcome, I’m so glad you’re here.
Kitchen Grocery Search Strategies
Welcome back to another episode of the Your Money Your Life podcast. We’re still in our Ask Me Anything series. And today I’m answering 5 questions when it comes to kitchen grocery search strategies, meal planning, etc.
The first question that I got was, how do you handle having things that you want to buy from different stores? Like sometimes Costco and Sam’s was the example that she used.
This might be a little high maintenance, I don’t know. But I love all these and all these are great. But there are certain things that I won’t buy from all these and there are certain things that I’ll buy from like Walmart. And how do you handle that?
Handling Multiple Stores for Grocery Shopping
The way that I handle this is I have multiple grocery lists. I have my standard, I use my, my Alexa. One, I’m not gonna say its name, so yours won’t light up. And mine won’t light up all the things.
I have a list that I call my shopping list and everything. That’s the general shopping list. Everything goes on there. But then there are things that we get specifically from all these.
I have all these lists. There are things that I guess specifically from Sam’s and I have a Sam’s list. So since I’ve never figured out the grocery pickup thing from all these, most of the time, I’m getting a grocery pickup order from Walmart.
And if we have to run into all these at sudden, every week thing, maybe once or twice a month, when the kids are in the waters during the school year, it’s probably more frequent, because I can run in there real quick by myself while they’re gone.
But having a separate list, it’s simple — have your standard list.
If there’s something you need specific from a specific store, have the list for that store. And when you go to that store, you can always check out your general list to see if there’s anything that you could get from here that you might want. If not, then you know you’re all set. It’s a little switch that makes it so much easier.
Planning Your Meals – Repeat or Rotate?
Next question I got was, do you just repeat the menu? Or do you actually plan it out each time and it’s a combination?
This has kind of evolved over time with talking about Meal Planning Made Easy. The mini course throughout all of this as well. These are a lot of the strategies that I teach you here and I show you both options inside Meal Planning Made Easy.
Originally, I was planning it out each time and I have categories. Like all of my chicken recipes were together all of my beef recipes were together. All my go-to meals were together. And if you don’t know what go-to meals are that’s a lifesaver. We’ll have to talk about that later because I don’t want to run out of time.
There was a point there where I had the chicken and the egg if and I would pick something from each category for each week and plan it out. But I needed a little bit more systematizing in my schedule.
So I sat down and put together for weeks — week A week B week C week D worth of recipes. I basically did the picking one out made sure there was at least 1 crock pot recipe and every single week. Because I want to have that easy option to be able to go to and put together those lists.
Then every extra option that didn’t fit in something, they have their own category on the sheet says “extras”. So when I write out the menu, I can swap something out if I don’t want to make something or something’s not gonna work. I guess the answer is kind of hybrid.
I have those 4 weeks of set meals — the menu to rotate through. I know I have 6 weeks’ worth of meals in general that I have recipes we’ve pulled out. But I found it easier to kind of rotate through those 4 because it fit on one page and that’s how it works.
Meal Prepping: Is It Necessary?
Next question I got was about meal prepping. And I really like this because a lot of times and I know I was guilty of this before I meal plan. We think that meal planning and meal prepping have to go together.
I used to do both. I do not meal prep. I’ve done some stuff in the past. It just doesn’t work for me and my family. Sorry, it doesn’t.
Meal prepping is where you spend 4 hours on a Sunday, or however long it takes you. You might have a do it faster. This might be something that you do and you’re amazing at like, Aimee, you’re talking about it all wrong.
The idea of me standing in the kitchen for 4 hours and prepping meals for the week does not feel feasible — just doesn’t. But I can jot down a quick list of things that I’m planning to make and be flexible about it. That’s a big different site time commitment-wise, what we’re looking for what we’re doing, if meal prepping works for you, great.
I don’t feel that meal prepping works for everybody. But I think that everyone can meal plan on some level and hopefully, by now you know that this is not something that we had to be so strict on. Like Monday we’re doing this Tuesday we’re doing this Wednesday we’re doing this and that’s it, we’re sticking to it.
There’s no other option you like if you forget to pull the meat out of the freezer, we’ll go on hungry. Any of those things, that is not how I do this. We pick out 5 to 6 meals. All of us are out inside the mini course. It depends on if you’d like to have leftovers if you plan to eat out once a week on how many meals you’re selecting for the week.
For us, it’s gotten to where I have 6 now sometimes we have arrived overnight, sometimes we don’t, sometimes leftovers or just for lunches throughout the week. But we picked 6 meals and I kind of write them out and probably work for Monday and that would work for Tuesday. It’s not even labeled like that on my sheet anymore.
It’s just like 6 meals on a list. And if something happens, life happens you know I forget to pull the meat out of the freezer or we’re out running errands late one day. I just pick something else off the list that we’ve already planned. That’s when we go to the go-to meals.
We go to meals is another strategy that we utilize we talk about inside Meal Planning Made Easy. That is a list of things that we keep on hand. So when life throws a curveball at you stuff hits the fan, you’re not having to go get takeout, just because there’s no other option.
There’s a difference between setting the intention and you want to go get takeout and I don’t know what the heck I’m making for dinner so I have to go get takeout. You see that difference?
Keeping Track of Your Shopping List
The 4th question I got was, do you use an app to generate a shopping list? And I do not.
I have an app. That’s it’s called Color Note. But it’s just like a list that I made of the items that I needed to check on every single week — quick for our grocery list, like milk, eggs, bread, some of those that we need on an every week basis just to make sure that we have enough.
I use my PayPal sheet, which you get all the customer service templates, inside Meal Planning Made Easy. So you see how I do all of this. And I have a recipe binder, which I also show you inside the mini course.
I’ll quickly glance at that recipe to make sure I have everything that I need for it. That’s just part of what I do every single week when I meal plan for the week on Thursdays with the kitchen inventory and the stock checklist strategy that I use, which we also briefly talk about inside Meal Planning Made Easy.
Essentially, we keep on hand 6 weeks’ worth of food. So we have almost everything that we need. It’s simply a matter of replenishing it once we use it.
When I go to make that meal, then I’ll add another pound of Italian sausage from the list or diced tomatoes or whatever it was that I used that I’m just adding to the shopping list to replace it. Hopefully, that makes sense.
I know that there are apps out there that do this, but I have not tested them myself. And I found this system to be a little bit easier with the way that we operate.
Overcoming Meal Planning Setbacks
And the last question that I got I’m answering today. I felt like this was a really great one to end off. They said, I’ll be successful in meal planning for 1 week, and then I fall off again. Do you have any suggestions for me?
I do. Because all too often, this is what we see. Like what happens. Like we set this intention to move forward. And we had the best of intentions, but then life happens. And it throws us off course, right?
There’s only 1 or two things that we see come up. The first is we try and make this drastic change. You’re like, I can do this, I can work out like 5 days a week.
All the things we go like hardcore and the solution is not to go hardcore. To keep going consistently, maybe you fell off. But then you keep going again, we had to build the habits build the routine. So we need to have the reminders in place, which really leads me to the second part.
Inside the Academy
And the second part is we’re doing this alone, we don’t have the accountability. It is so hard to make that change when there is nobody there to support you. That is why inside the Academy, it’s so important that you are able to be there and we do the live coaching calls together to help you stay on track.
Because you’ll eat food. If you don’t do this, write it. It’s simple to do, but it’s simple not to do. That is why we have to make the intentionality behind it.
So that we keep going that we have those reminders that we build those things in place, whether that’s setting a reminder on your phone or setting a reminder on your AI or whatever it is that you need help with to stay on track.
Or being a part of the Academy and being like, “hey, I need accountability to make sure that I meal plan”, so ask me what my meal plan is every week on the call. And then you’re going to end up doing it because you know that I’m going to be there saying “okay, hey, what? What do you got for dinner plan next week?”
If that’s you, if you’ve done this successfully and you’ve fallen off, I just want you to know you’re not alone. There are ways that you can move forward, that you can do this. Meal Planning Made Easy as you’ve heard on the sponsorship is definitely the place to be if you want to remove that frustration and struggle.
Connect with Me on Instagram
If you have additional questions, send me a message on Instagram. I’m @aimeecerka and I want to hear which one of these strategies and questions was really mind-blowing. It might be simple because a lot of this stuff is right. Might be simple but I want to hear which was mind-blowing like “wait, that was game-changing for me”. Strategy. Again @aimeecerka on Instagram, and we’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
Thank you so much for listening to the Your Money Your Life podcast. My favorite place to hang out is on Instagram, you can find me @aimeecerka. Send me a message or post a screenshot and then tag me! I love hearing from podcast listeners.
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