February 2009 Grocery Challenge

Girl_least_likely_to

Morning All :wave:, Hope all are having a nice weekend

Just a quick update on my spends this week. £29.44 in MrM's on a smallish milk, yog, f&v, bit of meat, rice, lentils, bread and juice shop. Then I had a wander around Wilkinsons yesterday, spent £16 odd but only £2.95 qualified as GC spends. They had Heinz Tom soup 4 pack for £2 and Daddies sauce 2 for 1 95p, OH won't debrand on either of these :rolleyes: . Not much left of my budget but I have all meals accounted for the rest of the week and should just need to get milk and fruit later on.

I have been mulling over what I include in my GC target. It is basically just food. I'm wondering that I should include toiletries, washing powder, cleaning stuff, medicines and booze. I only ever really buy value cleaning stuff, loo roll so I suspect I spend less than £10 a month. Toiletries like shower gel and deodrant I wait until they are on offer, on average I prob spend £10 again. Booze, we "entertain" once or twice a month at £15. Medicines I have a slight issue with, surely that shouldn't come out of the GC budget? Or is it a case of the money has to come out of some budget? In addition I'll have the cost of nappies and potentially formula for the new baby too!

I realise that we can include anything we want to in the GC budget and other people have a seperate booze budget for example. I just wondering whether to increase my budget next month say to £250 ish as this would paint a truer picture . I'm seeing the advantages of an annual budget too as I will stock up on offers when I see them. Ooooooh what to do :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

cw18

crazyaboutsaving wrote: »

So now I'm beginning to wonder, maybe 250-300 a month for two adults is becoming a reasonable spend for food?! :eek:

It really depends on your lifestyle and how much time you have for bargain shopping - plus whether do you mean purely for food?

I'm budgetting £1.80 per person per day, and there's just me and DS (almost 18) here full time. So that works out at around £110 a calendar month.

But I'm also feeding my grand-daughters during term-time (to the tune of 1 main meal for the younger one, and 8 snack meals between them), for which my budget is roughly the equivalent of an extra adult for 2 days a week (taking me up to a calendar month average of just over £120),

This is just for food, but anything DS spends from his EMA at college (a couple of lunches a week) or on pop/sweets/biscuits isn't included -- so by rights that should push my budget up by maybe a tenner a term-time week.... so more like a calendar monthly average of £155

This doesn't include any cleaning/laundry/hygiene products -- it's just purely for food and drinks. And there's no alcohol in there as I don't buy any (and very rarely drink any either). Neither do we 'eat out' - in fact the couple of college lunches are the only things not produced in my kitchen and eaten in the house (I'm not currently working).

But I have heaps of time to wander down to the local shops to check for Whoopsies - and that really can make a difference. Last month I spent a total of £169.30 (which included quite a lot of stocking up due to an unexpected trip to Costc0), but of that money £24.35 was spent on Whoopsies with a shelf value of £70.83.

So if you ignore the fact that I would never have paid full price for some of these things (some were treats, and others I'd have bought cheaper alternatives), then my grocery 'bill' for last month should have been £215.78 (plus extras DS bought himself).

If I'd included my cleaning/laundry/hygiene products, then last month would have increased by a further £15.75 - but again this included a stock-take purchase (enough bin liners for at least this year, and probably well into/all of next as well, plus several months of toilet rolls)

My spend this month is looking a lot lower, but this is due to having bought very little meat or in the way of store cupboard ingredients - purely down to having made a decision to have a 'use up' month. And it looks this this should continue into next month as well, but at some point in March/April there will be another steep hike as I refill the freezers - so it will (I hope) all balance out in the end

SAVVYMUMMY_2

Hi there crazyaboutsaving, congrates on your news.

I include all of my cleaning/laundry/hygiene items with my challenge, which bumps the budget up a little. I may try sperating the food/drink from the cleaning/laundry etc and see how I go from there, but not sure if I`m just making more work for myself with trying to seperate these.

cw18

I've seperated mine as I've always had a pretty good idea of what my food spend was - but spending on anything else has always been sporadic, so I've never kept track. By keeping them as a seperate budget I hope to use this year as a learning curve for the future

laineyc_2

I include cleaning products and toiletires in mine. I don't include alcohol or my beauty products.

Although I have spent £150 of March's budget already, my freezer is well stocked now so I should be set for the month and I am determined to come in under budget.

sashanut

Hi all, hope you are gearing up for the last few days - we can do it :j

I've updated my spends & although it looks pretty good atm I really want to have at least £50 spare to pay off one of my CC/s to get it down to under the £1000 mark...SO I have actually only £11.06 till the 28th :rotfl: Also, I am hosting a family Indian meal next Sat so that will pose a challenge as well.:D .....I did get Mr Sashanut to go to Mr Ms & get some more Cobra beer where it is 4 bottles for £2 (offer ends today though I think). Should be do-able I hope though as the kind Mr T sent me £7 of vouchers so that makes £18.06 yay. We have a free meal out today & on Friday also, so need to plan for the rest of the week lunches/dinners.

The pesky !!!!! cats are proving a problem as in a reverse snobbery way they won't eat the expensive Whiskas I bought them & will only eat Mr T's supermeat:mad: . I've tried mixing a bit in to the Mr Ts but they refuse to eat it, I will persevere though - surely they won't starve

BTW I include all spends in my total, except newspapers which we generally only buy on weekends. All other stuff comes out of grocery spends, inc toiletries, cleaning stuff, dog & cat food (& litter), alcohol & medicines (but not vits) HTH.

BTW I looked for Curry Queens recipes but came up with a big fat zero - any pointers anyone? TIA

rosieben

I include food, toiletries and cleaning/laundry in my budget but separating them on my spreadsheet; I'm also thinking of working to an annual budget as some months I hardly spend and others months (like Feb) I buy loads of stock items, so way over budget :eek:.

tbh, if you're taking control of food spending then it makes sense to also keep track of household and toiletries spending so that you have a true picture of where your money goes. I don't include prescribed medicines as there's no option to reduce the cost of these but I include over-the-counter medicines

I'm going to spend some time today working out my annual budget spreadsheet - I've downloaded some printable accounting papers to try out


Sashanut - do you mean Curry Queen's Curry Night thread?

OrkneyStar

Hi there,
Can't remember who was asking (sorry foggy today ) but.... we are on an annual grocery spend target of £2500, for 2 adults, 20 month old (who is now in disposable nappies full time instead of reusables) and 1 ageing cat. I have been working out how much we have spent so far and we are averaging about £44-£45 per week (so x 52/12 = ~ £193 per calendar month). This includes all food, toiletries, nappies, wipes, cleaning stuff and pet food, and although we have stuff in the cupboards to keep us going I have a use and replace policy (so this is a realistic weekly fig). The only slight deviation is adding on nappies but from now on I will allocate that figure to nappies each week and if I don't get any one week I will keep it aside in purse so that I can take advantage of offers. TBH where we live there is only Tesco, Lidl, Coop and local shops to choose from, the -ve side of that being less choice/competition price wise/availability of offers, the +ve side being less chances to spend money in different places!
I would say if you feel £250-300 is manageable for you and that you can afford it then it sounds ok. If you are struggling to afford it then thats a different matter . TBH I think the incentive for us to spend the amount we do (or less) is simply that if we spend more then we don't have any money to put away for other things (Christmas, holidays etc). I am hoping for M-F this week to be NSD's.
Finally GC is not a competition so it is not always helpful to compare your budget with others, compare ideas, recipes, tips etc.
Ok, sorry its long and hope its some help.
:wave:

Casperthefriendlyghost

Good morning everyone

I would like to declare my grocery spend for February at £ 165.90.
That is £15.90 over my target but am pleased as I have a yearly budget and have been stocking up.

Yesterday I went to MrT, don't usually like MrT but decided as I was not feeling so well that it's closest and I only needed eggs (for making bread rolls) and fruit. I bought value 15 eggs, 1 orange, 2 apples, 2 bananas, and 3 value strawberry yogurts for work next week as pay day is on Wednesday.

Once I got home I noticed that although the eggs were priced at £1.49 they had only charged me £1 so that was a bonus, I used my tesco voucher ( I only had £ 1.50 as I hardly ever shop there) and only paid £1.93 for the lot, which I was quite pleased about. I then spent the rest of the afternoon baking 8 Gluten and Wheat Free Bread Rolls (they're fantastic - found the recipe on this forum) so have enough rolls for lunch for work everyday next week. Am really pleased as I only took £5.00 and was determined not to spend any more. I kept looking at things I "needed" then decided against it, so it's working.

:T

Hope you're all having a lovely Sunday, not as sunny as yesterday but mild anyway. Have a good day.

Cheers
Casper
x x

Baileys_Babe

We include all food, including take aways & eating out. Also toiletries, over the counter mediciences, alcohol, cleaning stuff etc. Like Rosieben I do not include prescription meds as I am unable to reduce this cost.

Our budget is higher than many as we buy locally reared very happy meat (OH his own very strict guidelines for this) as well as many organic and or fairtraded goods. We are happy with this, we do try to keep the cost down by buying in bulk, not eating meat very often.