Money Mom Podcast
Welcome to The Money Mom Podcast—the ultimate guide for moms who want to take control of their finances, crush debt, and create a life of financial freedom and abundance. Hosted by Rachel Coons, a budgeting expert and mom of three, this podcast is your go-to resource for practical tips, mindset shifts, and empowering strategies to help you manage your money with confidence.
Whether you’re navigating grocery budgets, tackling debt, or dreaming of building wealth for your family, each episode offers bite-sized, actionable advice to make money management simple, stress-free, and even enjoyable. With relatable stories, expert insights, and a dose of mom-to-mom encouragement, you'll learn how to transform your finances—one small step at a time.
Tune in every week to discover how to save more, spend smarter, and feel empowered to create the financial life you deserve. Because when moms thrive financially, families flourish.
Money Mom Podcast
67: Vacation on a Budget: How We Fed a Family of 6 for Under $350
Just back from a dreamy Florida vacation, I’m sharing exactly how we fed our family of six for under $350—all while staying on the beach, eating well, and making the week feel like a true getaway.
In this episode, I’ll walk you through how I planned our meals, where we saved money (without sacrificing quality or nutrition), and the exact steps I take to grocery shop smart while traveling. Whether you're road-tripping or flying across the country, these vacation grocery hacks will help you cut costs and chaos.
Plus: why getting a kitchen wherever you stay can save you hundreds, how I use Walmart delivery to prep in advance, and how the same principles I use at home still work—yes, even on vacation.
If you’re planning a trip this summer, this episode will help you eat well, save money, and still make core memories with your family.
🎧 Listen in, then grab my free SHOP Method training linked in the show notes!
xoxo,
Rachel
Where to find me:
Instagram: @heyrachelcoons
Save $600/month on Groceries: FREE live training
Hey there and welcome to another episode of the Money Mom podcast. I'm recording this podcast on a Monday morning after just getting back from a wonderful, amazing, perfect vacation in Florida with my family. We had some crazy things happen this summer where our schedule changed a lot. We had to cancel a trip that we were planning to take to go visit my sister in Michigan, and so we had some flight credits, we had some time off of work and we really wanted to go on just a family vacation with just the six of us, and this is not something we've done very much in the past. We've done like quick overnight trips with just us, or we've done like very much in the past. We've done like quick overnight trips with just us, or we've done like trips up into the mountains, but we've never taken like a full week of just our family and done like a vacation with just us. And so I knew we had this time. I knew we had these flight credits.
Speaker 1:About a month and a half ago I started looking at vacation options and where we could go. I really I told Brad a month or two ago ago I just wanted to take a vacation and raw on the beach. A lot of times we end up booking ourselves a lot and doing a lot of things, and this was one. I just really wanted to take a relaxing vacation, and so I started looking at places. It ended up we found a really good deal at a two bedroom condo on the beach in Florida where our flights were super cheap. The accommodations were reasonably affordable and so I booked it like four weeks before vacation. It was one of the most last minute vacations we ever done, and I was really nervous about going to Florida in the middle of July and people who live in Florida are going to laugh at me, but I, you know, we live in California.
Speaker 1:It's super hot in the summer where we live, but I have heard about the humidity and the heat and how the water is hot there, the ocean's hot, and so it's just like constant, just kind of miserable for a lot of people. And so I had heard that and people were like why would you ever go to Florida in the middle of July? And I was like I don't know. Heard that, and people were like why would you ever go to Florida in the middle of July? And I was like I don't know. It was really cheap and we got really good accommodations on the beach, so we're going to try it out. So we ended up doing it and booked the flights and it ended up being like, seriously, the most blissful seven days with our family. I told Brad this is something that we're going to have to do every single year, because it was just so nice to just be together. We weren't with anybody else, we didn't have friends or family, so it was just us. Our kids got along better than they've ever gotten along before. It was just so nice.
Speaker 1:But while we were there, I was thinking a lot about the podcast and what episodes I could do to help you, as listeners, be intentional with your spending, save money budget and, especially in the middle of summer, when you are vacationing a lot, it tends to be an area when people travel, their budgets like go out the window and they're spending a lot on takeout, they're spending a lot on activities and it can get really expensive really fast and I feel like when we go on vacation, maybe we eat out a little bit more than we normally would at home, but as far as our food goes, we still are able to eat very affordably on vacation. I started thinking about this and what I do differently and how I am able to save so much money on my groceries, even on vacation. And so that's what I wanted to talk about in this episode is you're planning a trip, you're going away, whether that's with family and friends or by yourself, how can you still use the principles of the shop method and still be able to save money on vacation when it comes to food? And so I'm going to go through like what I do, what kind of my schedule looks like and how I plan out the food for our vacation, so that way I'm not throwing money away during these times. The first thing that I would say, and one of the most important things, especially for my family with you know, we have four kids, and so we need more lodging accommodations than like just staying in a hotel room. But I would highly, highly recommend, if you're going to stay somewhere for a long period of time, to find a place with a kitchen where you have access to a refrigerator, an oven, a microwave, something like that, so that you don't have to eat out every single meal. Now, if you're going to stay in a hotel room without a kitchen, there are ways to work around having one, but if you can, staying somewhere, even if it's just like a small kitchenette, really will save you so much money in the long run, especially if you're traveling with kids. When I go on a vacation by myself, eating out doesn't cost that much money for, you know, two or three meals a day, but when I'm traveling with six people, every time we would eat out we're spending $50 to $100 every single time, and that adds up. If you're staying on vacation for multiple days, you're eating out multiple meals a day. It can get super expensive really fast, and so, even if you know you want to eat out one meal a day, but having a place to go and store some food for one or two meals can really, really help save your budget on these vacations. So try and find somewhere with some type of kitchenette, some type of heating up, keeping food pool that you can have. I highly recommend that.
Speaker 1:So we stayed at a two-bedroom condo. It had like a full-on kitchen. It had already, like, had enough pots and everything's for cooking. So a couple days out, I started planning what meals we were going to want to eat on the vacation. This is one of those things too when you're planning meals, you have to be really careful about ingredients. You don't need a bunch of ingredients to make a meal. There's really easy meals that just require a couple ingredients that you can throw together, and that's what I would recommend doing, especially on vacation.
Speaker 1:The meals that we ate we had chicken tikka masala one night where I just purchased. All I purchased was chicken breast, pre-made tikka masala in a jar, broccoli and naan bread and some rice. That was a very basic meal. Another meal that I did was chicken Caesar salad. All I needed was chicken breast, romaine lettuce, caesar dressing, parmesan cheese, some French bread and some butter. I tried to build these meals where I didn't have to purchase a bunch of different sauces or ingredients that would all come together. I didn't need a bunch of spices, it was kind of all created. I just purchased it from the store and threw it together in the apartment.
Speaker 1:When we got to our vacation, I actually ordered my groceries the day before we showed up at the hotel. I had ordered everything on Walmart. I'd added all the things to my cart. I'd meal planned for three meals. I did three dinner meals and then I planned some breakfast. So for the breakfast I just bought a bunch of eggs and cheese and toast and butter and we basically ate scrambled eggs one day and toast for breakfast. We had breakfast burritos and then we had eggs in a hole one morning, so we had a lot of eggs for breakfast. But breakfast is one of those meals that I didn't want to eat out at all like ever, because I knew that we're going to be waking up in the morning and going out and getting breakfast was just not something that really I wanted to prioritize spending my money on, and so we saved money for breakfast specifically by just eating at the hotel.
Speaker 1:And then for lunch I planned just some easy lunch. Items were like turkey and cheese, so we could make sandwiches. We bought a bunch of bagged salads with rotisserie chicken that we threw together and had salads. For lunch we made quesadillas. That was really easy because, again, we had cheese, we had bread, we had tortillas, so we could just throw things together. I bought a bunch of fruit and a bunch of vegetables as well, because my kids love to eat watermelon, strawberries, grapes, whatever, and then we had like carrots and dip and a bunch of those salads, so we could still eat nutritional food but not costing a bunch of money. So I placed the order the day before we got there, I think I spent on our Walmart delivery order. I think I spent $125 for the whole week, which is really affordable.
Speaker 1:And then, when we got there, we also went to Costco and purchased the bag of salads, purchased the rotisserie chicken, brad and I got some protein shakes and then I'm trying to think what else. And then I got some like chip bags for the beach and also some chocolate, like those thin mint chocolate things that you get from Costco which are amazing. I don't shop at Costco very much, but they were there and I was like I want those, I want that bag, I will eat it the whole time we're here. So we bought that. So we did get some stuff from Costco as well on top. So I think for the week we probably spent $150 to $175 on food for the week, which is so affordable and what I would normally spend if I was home.
Speaker 1:I did purchase more convenience items, like I would not normally buy the jar tikka masala I would not normally buy. Actually, that was pretty much it, like most of the other stuff was pretty basic ingredients. So I planned out the breakfast, I planned out some dinners. We had lunch items on hand. It's exactly what I do normally when I'm home, where I plan out my meals, I order my groceries. It was amazing because the day we got there at like midnight on Sunday night, monday morning, we had our groceries at our door ready to go for the week and then we could kind of pick and choose. You know, we're out one day, we went out for lunch one day. One of the nights Brad and I went out to eat and left the kids at the condo. So we but we had enough food, so we weren't doing random takeout runs, we weren't ordering pizza late at night, we had enough food in our condo. So our whole food bill for the whole vacation ended up being around $300 total. Maybe it was $350. But that was what we spent on food and for a vacation for a family of six, that is really, really affordable.
Speaker 1:We used almost all of the food that I purchased. Because I use an essentials list at home and because I know how much food we normally go through in a week, I knew how much food to order for the week so we didn't have a bunch left over at the end. I see that a lot when families go on vacation and they're planning their meals, they go to Costco because they think they're gonna get everything cheaper and in bulk, but then they over-purchase where they're buying way too much food. So by the last day you're trying to eat through all the food that you bought and you're wasting a bunch of food at the end. So that was really important to me. It was like I would rather spend less on the front end, get less food and then have to make like a one or two trip store throughout the week if I need to do that. We ended up not having to do that, but I would rather have less food than more food, because that's just food that I'm going to throw in the trash at the end of the week because we had to fly home and I couldn't transport all of that food home. So we're able to eat really affordably.
Speaker 1:I had my groceries ordered delivered to our hotel room. If you don't have Walmart Plus or Sam's Club delivery, I highly recommend doing that. I would not order on Instacart just because Instacart is a lot more expensive for each item. They upcharge per item, but with Walmart in-home delivery I didn't have to pay anything, so it was free. I got the groceries delivered, I was all set up for the week, and it just made it really easy where we weren't wasting a ton of time having to go get food.
Speaker 1:You know that annoying thing when you're like at the pool or you're on the beach and then they're like everyone has to go back to the house and shower and get ready to go out to dinner. It was like, no, we'll go back to the house, I'll throw some food together and then we can go out and play again. We don't have to like get out and go sit down at a dinner, and with young kids, like my family's has, I don't really want to go sit at a restaurant on vacation. That actually doesn't sound like a vacation to me. I'd much rather eat in our home, and so that's what we chose to do, and it ended up being so seamless, so affordable, and I really think that if you're taking a vacation this summer, you can use some of these tips to help save you money in that as well.
Speaker 1:Now, on the flip side of that, before we left on vacation, I really tried to empty out my fridge and get rid of all my perishable food, so that way I'm not wasting food while we're on vacation at home. So our fridge was very empty when we got home. So I did the same thing on the way home. On our flight home on Sunday, I sat and I just ordered our groceries that we needed for the next two weeks. I meal planned what meals we're going to eat for these next two weeks and then I ordered my groceries. So Monday morning we got home. Sunday afternoon I threw something together for dinner that we had already in the freezer, and then we got home Monday morning Our food was here and I made breakfast with the fresh eggs and milk and cheese that I'd ordered while we were on vacation.
Speaker 1:So it's really so easy to have everything set up for you when you order your groceries online and get it delivered. You don't. I didn't have to take a grocery store run this morning, like I already have everything planned out for these next two weeks. It took me about 20 minutes on the plane to get everything organized to meal plan, to figure out what ingredients I need, and I a lot of times use our our meal plans from the money mom club to build out my two weeks of groceries, and so I ordered those groceries I spent I think it was $250 that I spent for the next two weeks, and we're set, we're good to go. I don't have to go back to the grocery store. Really using the shop method when you are either whether you're home or vacationing, it's such an easy way to save money, save time, make your life easier. Plan out your week so you're not running to the grocery store for those one or two items, and in the end my life is just so much smoother when I do it that way. If you haven't learned about the shop method and you want to know what it is, you can get a link for my free training and I teach you that method, start to finish in that training so you can click the link in the show notes and go register for that.
Speaker 1:But really, truly, I believe that family vacations they're a priority to me, especially after this week, after we had this amazing trip together and all the memories that we made and the time that we spent together. They are by far the number one reason that I want to have leftover money at the end of the month. I don't need expensive clothing. I don't need expensive clothing. I don't need expensive items in my life. I don't need nice furniture. I don't need any of that. What I need is family and being with my kids and spending and making these memories together. That's what's important.
Speaker 1:And eating out on vacation is fun, and spending money at new restaurants, trying new food, is so fun and I really enjoy that as well but it's not something that I want to waste hundreds and hundreds of dollars on, so I'm not willing to do that on vacation. So the ways that I do that is by ordering my groceries, getting a kitchen when you're there, making sure you don't overbuy, setting up your week for success so that you have the food in your apartment, and really, truly, I think it makes everything run smoother. So hopefully that helps. Share this episode with a friend if you know anybody that's struggling about their next vacation or worried about food. And I will see you guys next week.
