Quick question about weekly food budgets

Amanda65

Hi all

I am a regular poster on this forum, know exactly what we should be doing, but never quite seem to have taken the bull properly by the horns. Having had yet another couple of sleepless nights worrying about money, I am determined that I will not face another new year glossing over our financial difficulties.

I am preparing our budget and have been looking at lots of weekly food budgets on here (and the advice given) for inspiration. I just wondered, when people say that they feed their family on, say, £50 per week, does this include laundry and cleaning products and toiletries or purely food items

I am quite a good, confident cook, have a slow cooker so batch cook and use up my leftovers (always have at least two or three meals from our Sunday joint) and try to shop carefully. I've got better at bulking out curries, stews, bolognese's etc. with veg and pulses but cannot being myself to serving up some of the meal planner meals like egg on toast, as our main meal of the day :eek:

For your info, we are a family of 5 (DD's are 17 and 15 and DS 13 - and he eats more than me) so am feeding 5 adults really. Girls both have packed lunch, OH and both ased from home so each here and we have 3 cats:D

I have lots in the freezer and cupboard and am trying to stick to £50 per week for the next 6 weeks but struggling when I take items other than food into the equation.

Butterfly_Brain

Try by doing a storecupboard challenge it has worked for me in the lean months. Use everything you have in your cupboards and freezer and put a little bit of money away away each time you make a complete meal say £ 5 and put it in an envelope you will be surprised at how much you have at the end of a month and that can top up your shopping. Go for value lines and shop around for the best deals - Farmfoods are excellent for resonably priced food, frozen, canned and chilled I got a Family Steak Pie and a family Chicken pie both for 89p each this week and they are very tasty Milk is only £1 for 2 litres and you can get 9 toilet rolls for £2. Aldi are the cheapest for fruit and veg when they have their super 6 usually 49p.
See if you have a shoppers club in your area it can save you a lot of money
HTH and Good luck to you I know what it is to have money worries but I take each day as it comes.

bullet_2

I include all food and drink costs, any cleaning related products and nappies.

Beki

I feel the same as you, in that i know what to do, reeeeally want to do it, but i've not managed to fully grab the bull by the horns yet. Well, i have now, but i'm only a few days into it now!

Along with trying to keep our weekly food bill down as low as we can, we're also trying to boycott the supermarkets as much as possible, and buy local where we can.

So to stop us doing those "omg i went to tesco for milk and spent £30" kinda shops, we've just done a 2-month tesco shop for the things that we can't find locally very easily. Things like 6 x bread flour, 6 x each of s/r and plain flour, 3 pearl barley, 6 red lentils, 6 x 12-packs of loo roll... etc etc. and quite a few more basic items (the trolley was literally overflowing).

The whole lot came to £59 which amounts to £7.37 per week over an 8 week period which isn't too bad considering we used to spend over £70 a week there before!!! (that was before our lightbulb moment, and we used to wonder why we were forever having to borrow money!!!).

We then went to the farmshop for our fruit and veg, cheese, butter and milk. And in the farmshop is a butchers, where we bought all our meat (not much, about £7 worth i think, which included braising steak, sausages, mince etc).

Our coffee and fabric conditioner etc, when we need to buy it, will be bought from the local shop round the corner which i have to pass every day anyway, so no petrol spent there.

Hopefully this will work for us, but if it doesn't then we'll chalk it up to experience and come at it from a different angle I'm pleased we're managing to cut tescos profits, even if only by an insignificant amount, and also that we're supporting local producers, farmers, and businesses

Hope you manage to find the right way for you! xx

thriftlady_2

Just bear in mind that there are a lot of us who don't manage to get our food budgets as low as £50 a week for 5 adults It is only about £1.40 a head a day after all. I think if people are saying that they 'feed' thier families for as little as £50 a week then that is what is meant -just food.

oldMcDonald

I aim for anything between £35 and £50 a week and this is for food, toiletries, cleaning and dog food. I think an important thing to consider when setting your budget is your lifestyle, and if you would like to / are prepared to / couldn't ever imagine/ making changes to it.

When I first started to look at our weekly shopping I spent anywhere between £500 - £700 a month easily. At the beginning I was a brand junkie and the thought of dropping down to 'own brand' was horrific:o. For example, I used Toni & Guy hair care and that was that, no discussion - my hair care now is water wash only! Mr Muscle / Cif was the only way to clean - now it is vinegar/bicarb. I washed clothes in Persil and used fabric conditioner - I now grate up bars of value soap and use a tiny amount alongside a swish of vinegar.

What I'm trying to say is, maybe £50 is the level you are comfortable with for your food shopping and you are trying to push yourself too far when including toiletries etc. It is probably better to allow yourself a figure that you are able to do, rather than aim for something too low and feel bad as you regularly don't come in under that amount.

geordie_joe

Rather than set a target, why not do a weeks shopping, trying to save as much as you can. At the end of the week add up how much you have spent and take that figure as your average.

From then on try to match your average. Some weeks you will spend more than your average and some weeks you will spend a bit less. As the weeks go by, and you get better, you should match your average more times than you over spend.

SunnyGirl

Hi!

I spend between £30 and £80 a week on shopping, includes everything pet food, cleaning stuff etc, depending on how tight the budget is stretched. My dh is self employed & does door security work in the clubs in the winter when it's quiet in the business. On the weeks when the budget is a tight £30 I make a lot of potato & pasta based dishes, such as pasta bake, potato hash, soup with naan bread followed by a hot pudding & custard etc. My kids are dd 16, ds 14 & ds 10 and, like you, the 14yo eats more than anyone! I always offer a pudding after meals which helps to fill him up. He will also eat toast, crackers, cereal (although it's not cheap) anything that's around really for his supper. I also make cocoa with milk & toast for supper most nights & this seems to fill him before bed. Another thing he loves is pancakes. I'll make a big batch for breakfast at the weekend & freeze them layered up on greaseproof paper for extra snacks for him. It's really like filling a bottomless pit which I'm sure you know!!

I also do a 'main meal' in the evening with stuff on toast etc for lunch. What I have noticed is that when it's a tight week I have to make more in the way of snacks as I don't buy them. I do tell them all when the food supply is going to be down & remind them that it's helping the entire family by paying off debts in the long run. Lentils are a sneaky food round here - I have to put them in food & not tell tehm or it'd be met with cries of 'I don't like this'! Sorry to have rambled on if I think of anything else I'll post it. HTH

HockeyDuo8083

I agree with Butterfly Brain, store cupboard challange is a good way of getting the bills down. A lot of the time people don't use up what they can before they go for shop.

My tip is to use cash only for the food shop. I do a shopping list online with Mysupermarket.com then take the list along with me. I put a 'limit' of cash in my purse i.e if website totals at £35 then I usually put in £40. This means if website is slightly out then I can cover it. A lot of the time it is less so I put the extra cash into a jar and bank it at the end of the month.
I also find this way that some supermarkets do offers on the products on your list so I end up within budget with BOGOF's. This means I come whom with extra items which I can put away and use at a later date.

Obviously this really applies if you supermarket shop.

HTH anyway x

cady

i spend £100 a month but thats just 2 adults and a cat but we buy everthing .... what we started doing is when something big is on offer ie washing powder we buy as many as we can (we bought 6 ) and store them then use the money we would have spent on that itemin the next months shop to double buy another item so that when we had a hard month in dec we did a monthly shop for £30 as we has loads of tins, washing powder and loo roll already hth x

Hawthorn

I feed two adults, two teenagers, two little uns and a dog on around about £50 a week - this includes toiletries/cleaning products and laundry stuff.

To be absolutely fair, I didn't start out that way. I got myself in a position that I had a good back up, so I don't need the basics every week. Then, when things are on offer, I can buy more, and still remain within the budget.
So, I have enough Laundry stuff to last a long time. I boost the powder with soda crystals, for a start, and use less, but when they were on BOGOF, I bought £40 worth, because I didn't really need much food. So I got £80 worth of washpowder, for half that.
It's surprising how doing it like this manages to save quite a bit of money.
I also shop around various shops. I couple of times a month, I do an online shop, for stuff I can't get cheaper elsewhere. The other times, we do Aldi, Lidl, continental foodstores etc.
I never buy shampoo or conditioner on full price, ever, and rarely have to buy toothpaste on full price.
We don't use shower gel at all - soap only.
We don't buy cereals or bread. Porridge oats, and I make the bread.
I make my own household cleaners.
Deodorants are roll ons only - much cheaper, less wastage.
Doglet is on a good food, and this is sometimes where my budget falls down -Her food costs me £40 for 15kg, but that lasts about six weeks
everything is baked/cooked from scratch here.
I use popcorn for lunches, the stuff you pop yourself, as I found crisps were not economical at all, and just aren't healthy. A bag of popcorn lasts much longer, and I don't feel so bad about giving the kids that as a snack.
A lot of it is learning to eke things out further - good ways of doing this are adding veg, other proteins such as lentils/beans, or even oats to mince dishes.
I dont' waste anything. A chicken will do three meals for six of us here. Rubber chicken, FTW LOL.
First day will be a roast, next day a soup/stew made with the leftover chicken meat, and then I'll boil the carcass up with spare bits of meat on it, and use that as stew, base for curry (funnily enough, they don't notice the lack of meat because the taste is still there)
Anyway, you get the idea