Best Recipes for Meal Prep That Actually Reheat Well All Week

Meal planning is the best way to avoid the inevitable wilted bag of spinach and sour milk in the back of the fridge. But with the temptations of take-out and kitchen chaos, it can be hard to stick with the menu, even if you’ve tried all the tips for simplifying your weekly meal planning. Prepping and scheduling meals isn’t just for busy parents or those following a strict diet. It’s a structured way to stick to a budget and minimize cooking time throughout the week. Handwritten lists and spreadsheets can go a long way, but sometimes it can be a challenge to see the bigger picture in a little notebook. Whether you need to discover new recipes or just input them into a calendar for reference, there are tools that will come to your rescue, but often at a price.

How to Choose the Right Financial Planning Tool

Save your household’s favourite recipes, add photos, and organize by category. For more strategies on keeping the whole household fed without breaking the bank, read our article on budget grocery shopping tips for families of five or more. Parents juggling school pickups, sports practices, and work deadlines don’t have the bandwidth to manually plan seven dinners, three breakfasts, and a week of packed lunches.

Budget and Transaction Tracker with Google Sheets

Nathaniel Lee is an avid cook, drawing on his decades of home cooking and fine dining experience. He is a contributing chef at Mashed, and his recipes and contributions have been featured in Tasting Table, Edible Arrangements, Insanely Good Recipes, and The Daily Meal. Once you’ve made your grocery list, AnyList will even remind you when it’s time to buy items expiring soon. The benefits of meal planning have been shouted from every mountain and every Pinterest board, and rightly so. Meal planning can help with everything from slashing expenses to boosting nutrition.

You set your preferences once — dietary restrictions, allergies, cuisine preferences, household size, budget tier — and a fresh plan shows up every week. The meal planning app landscape has been through a shakeup. In the past 18 months, two major players — Yummly and PlateJoy — shut down entirely. Others, like Mealime and Prepear, have stagnated with minimal updates.

Explore Family Money Adventure

Recipes make smart use of ingredients to create delicious dinners that maximize your budget and keep your grocery bill to $95 a week. Kevin Payne is a personal finance and travel writer with bylines that include Bankrate, Business Insider, LendingTree, and Matador Network. He is the creator of Hey Kevin Payne, where he shares practical tips and tools to help people travel better. Kevin is the founder of the award-winning website Family Money Adventure and the host of the Family Money Adventure Show podcast.

• AnyList helps you organize your personal recipes and allows you to easily add recipes from other sources, like email messages and popular websites and blogs.
• A dedicated meal planning app attacks all three problems at once.
• When you use cash, it activates the pain centers of your brain, creating more friction for every purchase.2 Simply put, when you spend cash, you feel it.
• A good meal planning app keeps everything organized so meals can be planned faster and grocery spending stays under control.
• If a child under 13 is found to have submitted personal information, that information will be removed.
• This food-sharing app features recipes with easy-to-follow photos and instructional videos to make cooking simple for home cooks of any skill level.

Customer satisfaction is also a key part of our review process, which is why we only feature products that are highly rated. Our shopping list will condense all the meals you choose into a single list for easy shopping. We created Family Money Adventure to help families take control of their finances and build the life they’ve always wanted. We share practical tips, tools, and resources to help you master your money and reach your goals. Budgeting apps can be a game-changer, but they are not a magic fix for money management. The best ones help you track spending, build better habits, and stay on top of your financial goals, but you still need to use them consistently to see results.

Mealime — Best free option for quick weeknight meals

RepoFinder helps you find repo cars for sale directly from banks with no dealer fees or commissions. You can also shop by state in high-demand markets like Florida repo cars, Texas repo cars, and California repo cars. Set daily, weekly or custom reminders to ensure that you never forget to write in your journal. You can write in your journal when not at your computer with our iOS and Android apps. Show your style by customizing the look of your lists with multiple unimeal review fonts, colors, and textures.

Types of Budgeting Apps

All investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Working with an adviser may come with potential downsides, such as payment of fees (which will reduce returns). There are no guarantees that working with an adviser will yield positive returns. The existence of a fiduciary duty does not prevent the rise of potential conflicts of interest. Lonely Planet, a popular publisher of travel guidebooks, has a great mobile website that lets you explore your next travel destination.

Features to Look for in a Google Sheets Budget Template

Whether you’re a foodie who loves to try new recipes or you simply want to find food to feed the picky eaters in your family, Prepear has you covered. Everyone has that one friend they can count on to make the perfect menu suggestions when you’re eating out. Yummly is a lot like that friend–if they lived in your pocket and were determined to make meal prep anything but boring. For example, if you don’t like eggs for breakfast, just drag them into another meal later in the day!

My favorite part of Plan To Eat

PocketGuard makes our list of best budgeting apps because of its powerful debt payoff plan feature. Monarch Money is a premium budgeting app that combines expense tracking, goal setting, and investment management. A recent update improved navigation and overall user experience, making it easier than ever to keep tabs on your finances. Unlike some budgeting apps, Monarch Money is designed for flexibility, letting you customize categories, collaborate with a partner, and track your financial progress in one place.

Fast, affordable dinners your family will love.

Instead of deciding what to cook every day, you follow a simple weekly plan that keeps your kitchen organized and your grocery budget under control. Meal planning can be a struggle—especially when you’re already juggling so many things! Thankfully technology has your back with these easy-to-use meal prep apps. They’re all designed to make meal planning as straightforward as possible. With recipe ideas, grocery lists, and exciting features (like ingredient prep checklists!), there’s something for everyone. Take a look at our top 8 meal plan apps to discover which one is right for you.

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

This app supports all world currencies as well as cryptocurrencies. It works offline, and the paid version ($3.99 per month) lets you take pictures of price tags for conversions and set up custom conversion rates. When you’re in a new location and need a quick recommendation, especially for food, Yelp comes in handy. It gives insight into the quality of businesses and services, from restaurants to mechanics, based on user reviews. The reviews can certainly be biased at times, but Yelp often at least lets you get a sense of what to expect.