January Challenge: Report Your Progress & E-Mealz Giveaway - CLOSED!

This month we tackled prioritizing and scheduling our time. How are things going? Has this month's challenged helped you? I'd love to hear about your progress from the challenge!

This giveaway has ended and commenting is closed. 

Chosen by the random integer generator at random.org, the winner is...

Congratulations to #19 JoDell.

(Please check your email and respond within 48 hours to claim your prize!)

Thank you to E-Mealz & everyone who entered! =]

E-Mealz has teamed up with me this month to offer you a wonderful prize! It goes perfectly with this month's time management topic, and will go great with next month's *soon to be revealed* topic.

I have been using E-Mealz service for the last two weeks and it has really been a time saver for me. I used to be really into meal planning and it saved us time and money every week. Now with my lack of time, I've put meal planning and couponing on the back burner. No good. E-Mealz has made meal planning so easy for me. All I need to do is log in to my account and print the menu each week. All of my meals, along with their ingredients and instructions, are on one page with a categorized grocery list on the second page. There's a section on the grocery list for me to add other items I need as well.

I honestly though that a meal planning service wouldn't be of good use to me because Chris and I are picky, and most recipes have too many servings and we end up with a fridge full of leftovers we'd never eat. E-Mealz has meal plans for two, which is genius. There's enough for leftovers for my lunch for the next day, but not enough to feed an army. And the recipes are surprisingly meals that we've both really enjoyed so far. Love it.

There are lots of options to change your meal plans according to your needs: you can specify what grocery store you shop at and they'll base meals off of what's on sale (if they cover your grocery store) or you can specify dietary restrictions (low-fat, gluten free, low-carb, portion control, and more). Something for everyone.

Here's the blurb E-Mealz gave me to share, giving more info about their company:

E-Mealz relies on a team of experienced meal planners, writers and editors to create new dinner menus every week that are designed around grocery store sales, seasonal specials and diet preferences. For $5.00 per month, subscribers download a recipe plan for the week with a matching aisle-by-aisle grocery list. The easy-to-follow recipes usually contain fewer than seven ingredients to allow for prep times of less than 30 minutes. It also helps families stay within a predictable budget by being prepared with a detailed list to use at the grocery store.


The E-Mealz program provides a consistent and reliable approach to food budgeting by factoring the weekly cost of ingredients into each menu plan. Menus are created around a budget of $75 per week for families and $35 per week for couples.


E-Mealz was created by sisters Jane DeLaney, mother of four, and Jenny Cochran, mother of three. The sisters were frustrated by the challenge of coming up with healthy, budget-conscious meals for their own families and inspired by their own mother’s frugal ways, they launched the program in 2003. 

For more information, visit their blog (www.maketimeforfamily.org) or Facebook page.

E-Mealz has kindly offered to give one reader a three month membership to their service ($21 value).

To enter (mandatory entry):

• Leave a comment on this post (not on Facebook and no email entries) telling me:
• How did you do with the challenge this month? Did you complete all parts of the challenge, or just some? I'd really love to hear what you learned! If you have a blog and want to write a post about it, leave the link to your post!

Optional entries (leave a comment for each extra entry):

• visit the E-Mealz site and tell me which plan you're most interested in
• like E-Mealz on Facebook
• follow E-Mealz on Twitter

Giveaway rules:

• You must be a follower (through Twitter, FB, GFC, or RSS/email) of The Nest Effect to win.
• The winner will be chosen by random.org.
• Please make sure your email is either linked in your profile or on your blog OR that you include it in your comment. If I can't find your email address, I can't contact you as the winner. 
• One entry per person - no extra entries for this giveaway.
• Giveaway ends February 2 @ 9 PM (MT).

Disclosure: This giveaway is sponsored. The prize, information, and giveaway have been provided by E-Mealz. Any opinions about products stated in this post are completely honest and purely my own.