My husband and I shop once a week, usually on Saturdays, and then cook a bunch of food together, usually on Sundays. We plan out our menus to have three rotating meals for a week on lunches and dinners. We usually eat out once or twice towards the end of the week or on the weekend as we gear up for the second week. We almost never eat lunch out during the week and having food prepared in advance makes it easy to come home and reheat rather then grabbing take out.

I try to keep my restaurant budget to $100/month, which is the same as going out to dinner about 3-4 times a month. I also keep to a $160/month budget for groceries and $70/month max for going out to lunch at work. I only eat meat or seafood away from home, so keeping a vegetarian kitchen lowers my grocery spend significantly. I've also created an incentive program for myself to bring lunch to work: I only let myself take the ferry to work ($6.50 each way - ridiculous! but so convenient...) after I've brought 10 lunches. I check off a box for each lunch I bring and therefore the more often I bring lunch, the more often I can take the ferry to work. Since lunch is around $7 to $8 if I buy it out at work, I save myself a ton of money by bringing food. I've been able to keep well under my $70/month "lunch out" budget for the last few months!

Lots of the same as above. I don't have a specific budget, but I shop only the loss leaders weekly and otherwise use a local budget grocery. I only buy meat on mark down, package it and save it till I need it, even though we only have the fridge freezer. I cook 6 or more dinners a week, breakfast most weekends, and take my lunch to work every day, as a teacher with a 20 min lunch there is no going out. I will occasionally pick up lunch on the weekend for my hubby and I and one or twice a month we go to breakfast. I try to always use coupons for our dinners out. My biggest struggle at this point is to remember I need less food since the kids have flown the nest. Still not used to only needing 2 servings. I try to always cook enough of my main course to last for dinner twice and sometimes a lunch tool Cooking once and eating twice makes life much easier after school.

With practice cooking is a snap. I can make dinner from scratch in much less time than it takes to decide where to go, drive there, wait to order and finally get our food. In the time that takes I can have dinner on the table, eaten and the dishes washed!

I am a college student, I spend no more than $110/month on groceries. I try to keep my eating out at no more than $40/month , but thats my current struggle lol. I always eat breakfast and lunch at home. I cook dinner most nights and on the nights I don't, I eat leftovers or go out to dinner with my boyfriend. We usually eat out once or twice a week. I would love to get that down to one a week, no exceptions!

Echoing the above, keeping meat down is a great way to save money (and help the planet! And save the cute animals!), and I do buy on sale. But we live in DC, and don't have a car, so I'm not interested in schlepping groceries to and from the store. We buy from Peapod once or twice a month, and that's pretty much it. We buy fresh veggies, eat them till they run out, and then move on to the frozen veggies (which are usually just as nutritious as fresh, if you're buying from the grocery). I try to keep our meals approaching $1 a meal per person. Dinners are almost always over, but at least lunches stay pretty close to that (we rarely go out for lunch, but it's sometimes fun, we are friends with most of our co-workers). Ramen helps make up for an expensive week too, and you can add veggies to make it less awful for you.

However, in the past few months I've had more stomach issues and we've been feeling poor, so we're remodeling a lot of our food habits. Very little pre-made food anymore, and if it is, it has to be from a natural/organic brand (expensive, but still less expensive than eating out!). Trying to stay away from pasta, cutting down the dairy. It's all an experiment!