How I Do a Simple Monthly Meal Plan: Tips & Free Printable

Start by creating a basic calendar grid either on the computer or by hand. You’ll be making 7 columns across, for the days of the week, and 5 rows down for 4 to 4.5 weeks in a month.

Keep in mind this schedule will not be set in stone. We are still going to come in every week and do a meal plan that is a little bit more tailored to that specific week. 

The goal is to get a skeleton plan done. It is way easier to work off something like this every week as opposed to starting from scratch or just making a random list of meals and putting random things in there. Having a rough outline will help set you up for sticking to a meal plan.

We’re going to organize things by day of the week, and by that, I do not mean every Monday is chicken night, every Friday is pizza night, and every Sunday is pasta night.

What I mean is you want to go off your weekly schedule of what is going on in your life. You’re going to need to consider what is going to make sense and fit into your schedule for that day. You might end up having to redo this a few times a year.

I’m redoing my meal plan now because my kids are going back to school and doing after-school activities, so our schedule is changing.

They have soccer practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so for those days, I want to schedule something easy, or something made ahead of time. Tuesday will be what I call a make-ahead day. I’m going to schedule Thursday as an easy day or a leftover day. 

On Saturdays, we will typically either go out to eat at a Mexican restaurant or we will get takeout. That basically leaves me with three or four days of the week that I have to think of a theme or category to work off of.

Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, there's really nothing stopping me from making a more elaborate dinner, but that’s not something I like to do all the time. I’ll schedule a nice dinner on Sunday. 

For Friday I'm going to schedule family favorites. I'm going to write down family favorites again for Monday. Wednesday I am going to do other meals. Other meals are meals that we don't eat all the time or stuff that we make every once in a while.

Now to give you a better idea of what I’m doing I’m going to make some entries on the days of the week we’re having family favorites. We always love chicken tenders and fries. That will be one of our family favorites, but we are not going to have chicken tenders and fries every single Monday.

You'll notice that we’ve scheduled a fifth week of the month. There are not going to be five Mondays every month. There are not going to be five Saturdays every month, so it is really acceptable to repeat things in the last week of the month. It's not going to come around every single time. 

If you’re looking for ideas, some other examples of family favorites for us are things like homemade pizza. Another thing that we do a lot is appetizer night. When it comes to figuring out your make-ahead meals I would really recommend that you sit down with your recipes. This will help you think of things to make.

One of my make-ahead meals will be chicken broccoli stir fry, for example. Although I could go on telling you which meals I’m putting into my schedule, I think you've got the basic idea. Plan out meals that you and your family enjoy. 

The reason why this type of planning is so helpful is that it’s tailored around your schedule so that simple things are made on busy nights and the more complicated meals are made on nights when you have more time.

You're balancing your work so you're never doing two complicated dinners back-to-back because that can get really tiring. You don’t want to overextend yourself in your plan because that will make it hard to stick to it. 

To help you get things moving, start with your theme nights, like family favorites, to fill out your skeleton. When you’ve got everything mapped out on the calendar, once a week sit down and check that what you have written down makes sense for the week. I would recommend doing this on Sundays. 

You will also be fleshing out the meals with more details. With your homemade pizza, for example, you're going to write down what toppings you're having and what kind of salad you're making. Let’s say with this meal you're going to serve fresh fruit.

What kind of fruit? These kinds of details are what you’re going to add to the schedule. This will also be really helpful when making your grocery lists. 

Having your meal plan mapped out in advance is super helpful. The fact that it’s also detailed is going to help you plan things ahead of time for the week. That’s all there is to it. 

Monthly meal plan

Following the instructions I’ve given here will be a great way to get started with the system. You can also print out some of your most frequently used recipes and let those sort of guide your plans as you're working.

Thank you so very much for reading. Leave me a comment to let me know if this has been helpful, or can share your methods with me. I love hearing from you guys!