As weird as it sounds, paying for a meal delivery service has really cut down our cost for food. We used to be poor planners, so would just go to the store and buy staples without having actual meals planned out in advance. More often than not, nothing really looked good or we wouldn't have all the ingredients to make a meal, so we'd order out.

For the price of ordering out once a week, we now have ingredients for 3 or 4 meals delivered to the house every week. Then it takes the guess work out of planning, because it narrows down our options to what we had delivered.

Sure, it's more expensive than doing the planning ourselves and going to the store to buy the ingredients. But it sure does save us a lot of money overall, since we now eat out less than once a week, instead of multiple times per week.