If you love to save money, listen up. If you eat out a lot, this post is for you. If you don’t, then you’ve probably already figured this out, so you can find another post to read.

In our family, we get lazy. A lot. It isn’t that I don’t like to cook, because I do. I love to cook – as long as I have a real recipe to use or I can dig around in the kitchen and find something to throw together. But if it’s just hamburger helper, boxed mac & cheese, or hot dogs, I’m so not there.

We are a household of three with a food budget that isn’t particularly big. Usually we eat out until we know we just can’t do so anymore, then we scramble to fill the rest of the month with the cheapest meals possible – hamburger helper, boxed mac & cheese, and hot dogs.

Well, in April, I decided that we were just going to have to buckle down and start eating at home. Not because I don’t enjoy eating out, but frankly, because we need to start saving some money around here in regards to the food budget. So I started checking out my pinned food items on Pinterest and soon found a wealth of recipes that just sounded good. The biggest cost for most of these recipes is the meat! I mean, seriously!

Last month we spent for groceries for the entire month what we usually spend going out to eat for a week and a half. We only eat one meal per day here (our schedule just isn’t conducive to eating more than one meal per day), so we spent about $250 total, if that, for a month’s worth of groceries. So far this month we’ve spent about $170, but we have all the chicken we’ll need for the entire month, all the cheese we’ll need for the entire month, and a few other items that we’ll use over the course of the rest of the month.

We used coupons that Target sent us in the mail (we usually have three or four of the coupons that are useful, so we really hope Target doesn’t stop sending them), we used the coupon that Target printed out for us when we shopped there last time, and next time we’ll use the coupon that Target printed out for us this time.

We have three stores we go to, all three are within two miles of each other, so we really don’t use a lot of gas to get from store to store. I get the sales ads for all three together when I go to shop and I have a list based on our menu for the month. Sometimes we can even get more than one meal out of a single recipe – such as getting what amounted to two meals of taco soup and two meals of beef stroganoff, which also helps with the grocery bill because I can plan for two nights of one meal if needed to reduce the grocery cost.

Have you tried seeing what you save by eating at home?