The Scoop on Paid Menu Planning and Couponing Programs

If you are like most parents these days you have little time and limited cash. No matter how many hours are left in your day or dollars in your wallet we all have one thing in common; we need to feed our family healthy meals, quickly, and on a budget.

Many of us are looking for the magic bullet that will solve all of our mealtime woes. We join email groups, clip coupons, buy magazines and cook books, some of us even go as far as joining programs online that guarantee us huge savings in time or money if we follow their simple plans. Some of the programs that come to mind are ones such as WWW.SavingDinner.COM or WWW.TheGroceryGame.COM. There are even free menu planning web pages such as WWW.Menus4Moms.COM but go to them and you will quickly see ads flash on the page for other paid programs that are supposed to tame the dinnertime madness. Are these services worth your time and money? Lets take a closer look.

The programs at the Saving Dinner Website are meant to help you get interesting and healthy meals on your table with less hassle. If you are familiar with WWW.FlyLady.COM you may recognize the name Leanne Ely, she has been working hand in hand with the creator of Fly Lady to create happier, cleaner, and more organized homes all over the country for years. Saving Dinner offers a program called Menu Mailers. These menus come with shopping lists and recipes to make six delicious, seasonal meals a week. The Menu Mailers come in a variety of types to appeal to people with all kinds of tastes. Some of the offerings are The Regular Menu Mailer, Low Carb Menu Mailer, Frugal Menu Mailer, a heart healthy Menu Mailer, a Body Clutter Menu Mailer for those who are trying to lose weight, and special Menu Mailers for those who like to freeze meals ahead of time for use later.

Menu Mailers are not free. You will need to take out the credit card and pay for the privilege of having a nutritionist plan our your meals for you. Prices start around nine dollars for a subscription. It is very reasonable but there are some catches. First off subscriptions do not last forever. Second you may have a picky family and they will not like all the meals planned for a week. This means you will need to go through the trouble of planning an alternate meal and altering your shopping list. In the past when I joined this service I found several weeks were there were more than one meal my family would not eat. Another draw back to this program is the cost of food. Do not get me wrong, the meals are healthy and well balanced but some of them menus can really break the bank. In the past when I was using this plan I averaged the cost of the meals for my family of six to be about one hundred dollars a week and that was only for dinner. Your mileage will vary due to geographic location and season but for those of us who live in an area where food costs are high you will not save any money using this plan. This program gets a thumb up for nutrition and diversity but a thumb down for cost. If you still think you might enjoy this kind of plan you can buy Saving Dinner by Leanne Ely, which is a book full of seasonal menus, recipes, and shopping lists just like the ones you get from Menu Mailer. The book can be found at most retailers including Barnes and Noble, Borders and WWW.Amazon.COM. Some local libraries may also have a copy you could borrow and see if it is right for you.

Another menu plan on the scene can be found at WWW.Menus4Moms.COM. A busy home schooling mom started this program. While not a nutritionist, the lady who runs this website tries her best to plan five or six healthy meals a week for you. Again you are provided with shopping lists and recipes. One nice bonus of Menus 4 Moms is that some meals you will make extra food to place in your freezer to use at another time cutting your meal prep time in the future. This program is free but you will find a large amount of advertising on the page for related services and products. There is even an ad for a service that will help you to plan kid friendly breakfasts and lunches for a fee.

Menus 4 Moms is not perfect. Like anything else it has it's points both good and bad. The best part is the service is free. You can access the archives for past menus at anytime so you can plan ahead or choose a menu that may work better in your climate or situation. Menus 4 Moms has one draw back in common with Saving Dinner's Menu Mailers; if you have picky eaters in your home you will have to think of and plan out alternative meals. The final drawback is there are no special diet plans available, some people will find the meal plans will not fit into their personal nutrition plans. As for cost of the meals this one will cost you slightly less to prepare than the Menu Mailers because it relies less on fresh produce items and specialty items. I give this service a thumb up for being a free service and another thumbs up for the added bonus of helping you stock the freezer.
The last thing I would like to talk about is one of the most popular grocery savings programs out there, The Grocery Game. The Grocery Game is a paid service that promises to show you how to save tons of money on your groceries through buying what is on sale and couponing. For one dollar you can do a four-week trial of the service to see if you like it. I highly suggest doing this before investing your money in it. I will talk about this more later, for right now let me explain how the Grocery Game works to save you money.

First to play The Grocery Game you will need to enter your zip code to find out if there are any participating stores in your area. If there are you can play the Grocery Game, if not you are out of luck. Next you need to choose your favorite store so that you can get its weekly shopping list. If you would like more than one stores list you will need to pay for it. Once you are all signed up you can access your weekly shopping list. Items on the list are color-coded. Green items are free when you use the right coupon or combination of specials. Blue items are a good deal and black items are on sale but are not a very good deal so you should only buy them if you need them. The Grocery Game will match up coupons in their data base from current and past coupon books that come in your Sunday paper with the grocery store's current sales. If you shopped only from these lists I have no doubt that you would save money but these lists are only compiled of the items in the sales circulars.

You will want to have several weeks of coupons saved up before you join The Grocery Game or you will not have enough to get any of the great deals they point out to you. Although it may be nice to have some of this work done for you in the long run you could sit down with the grocery stores weekly ad and your coupons and figure out the same things for only the investment in your time. One other drawback is that the items you buy with coupons are name brand items. Often you can purchase a comparable store brand item for even less than the sale item with a coupon; in this case you really are not saving any money. The final problem I found with The Grocery Game is the limited selection of stores to choose from. In my state there is only one store available and it is a store that I generally do not shop at because of its terribly high prices. If I played The Grocery Game and shopped only at this store with the list provided I would probably spend more on groceries than if I shopped at my favorite store with out coupons. Because of this I recommend buying the one-dollar trial offer because you commit to the Grocery Game. I give this program thumbs down savings and another thumbs down for lack of store selection.

So Mom and Dad you have heard the hype, you have heard the real scoop now it is up to you to decide what will work for your family. Visit any of the websites listed in this article to learn more about these programs.