By: Christine Steendahl

Are you searching for a great way to save money on your grocery bill? A Menu Planning Service can help. These innovative services help you plan, cut costs on grocery costs and manage your dinner meals simply and easily.

Menu Planning services provide moms with a simple to follow dinner menu for every week. Not only do you get great dinner meal suggestions including main dishes, side dishes and desserts that are delicious, simple to make and nutritious, but you also get a tailored grocery list to easily shop for the foods for the upcoming week. You can save tons of money, because when shop for only what you will be preparing and what ingredients you will need you won’t wastefully purchase foods and items that you don’t need.

Many people waste hundreds of dollars each year purchasing food items that they don’t need. In many cases foods are wasted, because they sit around not being used in any meals you make. Once you find a meal suggestion for these items, they are usually too old, spoiled or stale.

By using a menu planning service you will also cut costs on fast food and casual dining restaurant bills. Many families become discouraged when there is no food in their refrigerator. Instead of preparing a nutritious and low cost meal at home, they opt for the convenience of visiting fast food and casual dining establishments that can easily run $20, $50, $100 or more. If you are searching for a solution to keep you at home instead of at high priced restaurants, a meal planning service is an economical and efficient solution.

Another way you can receive the rewards from menu planning is with all the time you will save. Now that everything is planned out for you, you won’t have to spend time each day running back and forth to the grocery store to buy needed food items, you can have your whole week’s meals planned out and have a comfortable and relaxing time at home with your loved ones.

If you are searching for a great way to save on your grocery bills, look into a menu planning service.

Author Resource -> Dine Without Whine is the perfect menu planning service for energetic families. Visit http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com to explore even more rewards to menu planning.

Working with numbers is something I really enjoy, except when it comes to budgeting. Actually, I don’t even really mind setting up a budget and maintaining it. My problem is that there is always more bills than money. So even though I enjoy the numbers game and the challenge of improving our financial situation, this is a really big area of stress for me.  The stress usually outweighs the pleasure.  But it has to be done anyway.

One of the ways I’ve dealt with the financial stress is by creating “Financial Friday“.  I only deal with finances on Fridays, and once the routine financial chores are out of the way, I focus on improving only one line item of my budget.

Let me share with you a few of my financial victories in improving the more bills than money problem…

Auto Insurance: Focusing on just this one budget item, I started evaluating the best way to lower my auto insurance premiums.  I compared companies and rates.  I combined all family autos onto one policy in order to get a discount.  (You could add your homeowner’s insurance for an even better rate if applicable.) Then I started chopping off any coverage that cost more than the premium was worth and increased my deductibles. By the end of the day, I had cut my total auto insurance budget in half.

Cable/Phone/Internet: (Okay, so that’s more than one item, but they are now one category in my budget because I “bundled” them.)  I’m not afraid to play one company against another.  So when my cable company began offering phone service, the negotiations began.  I immediately called my phone company and asked them what they would do to keep me as a customer.  They offered me a pretty darn good deal.  Then I took that offer right back to the cable company and asked them to do better.  They did!  Now my cable/phone/internet bundle costs less than I was paying for cable and internet before.  And even after the promotional offer expires, the cost will be about the same as before, but I’ll now have free long distance, caller ID and call-waiting, which I didn’t have before.

One of the benefits of setting up a budget is being able to see everything in one place, in black and white.  Only once this is accomplished you can start conquering the more bills than money problem. 

If you need help setting up a budget, I recommend the Family Budget Guide Ebook.

Increasing gas prices. Increasing insurance costs. Increasing everything. But stagnant income. Had enough yet? I know I have!

One thing in our favor right now is low mortgage rates. I decided to take advantage and see if we could help our financial position. We just refinanced our mortgage and got a much better rate. We even freed up a little cash in the process. It was really easy and only took a couple of weeks, tops. It’s certainly worth looking into.

Grab a good rate while you still can!

Doesn’t it just burn your butt when you go to the store to buy printer cartridges for your printer?!?  A full set of color ink cartridges for my HP Photosmart C5180 All-In-One costs a quarter of the price of the printer itself!  That’s just plain crazy!

Each of the 5 colors that I need costs about $9.99.  You could buy a color combo pack for $35.99 that has all five colors and prints about 150 photos.  But if you want enough ink to print a lot of documents, or heaven-forbid more than 150 photos, you “should” get the combo pack with larger quatities of ink for $44.99.  (Oh… You didn’t know that the cartridges come with different quatities of ink either?)  Only some of the HP packages tell you how much ink is actually in the cartridges.   In the larger combo pack, the color cartridges have about 3.0 ml of ink.  (Whatever that means.)

So I just stood in the store trying to figure out if it was even worth buying the cartridges.  Finally an associate directed me to some store brand remanufactured cartridges that were only $40.99 for the color combo pack.  Each of those cartridges contained about 7.0 ml of ink.  NOW we were getting somewhere, but I still didn’t want to pay that much money.

Compare that to the color cartridges at 123Inkjets.com.   Their compatible color printer cartridges hold between 7 and 12 ml of ink for only $6.50 each.  More ink.  Less money.  Imagine that.