£20 a week OS challenge- you'll be seeing more of me I think!!

Ali-OK

Hi everyone

I've chopped our budget down to £20 a week for 2 of us (me and the 5 yr old!), which included using the market for fruit and veg. However, I'm now using a local farm shop and generally coming in at the £15 mark! The quality and freshness is excellent. I used to spend £60 a week and the waste was unbelievable :eek:

I also meal plan now and to avoid waste, do meals Sun-Wed to use the fresh veg and move onto pasta/rice later in the week. We're lucky that my Mum makes batch shepherd's pies too - so I get a stock of 10 each month to freeze and 1 pie between 2 with piles of veg is a scrumptious meal.

I'm a stickler for BOGOFs and only last week the checkout girl asked if she was seeing double because I had so many of them lol. During March I've saved £38.41 on BOGOFs and have found Wilko's to be a good source for hair/beauty/cleaning products, though Boots had a BOGOF on my shower gel. If a BOGOF is a mainstay item then I'll stock up (but still keep to budget).

I'm stuck on washing liquid now..so off to hunt for some tips on here!

**purpleprincess**

I'm aiming for £20 a week too. Will try less as there's only really me, but boyf spends a lot of time round mine. I am doing the grocery challenge, kept all my receipts in March and I thought I was spending £80 a month but I had actually spent £156.11!!!! :eek: So am going to (try to!) get it down this month!

My best ever investment has been a slowcooker, just had to buy one after seeing all the good comments on MSE about them!!! And I love it!! :smileyhea I cook in bulk and then freeze meals. Still very new to it though. One I tried with left over chilli and rice was to just put both in a box and freeze it. Had a lovely "ready" meal last night!! :T There are so many things I want to try that I've seen on this site, fab recipes etc etc.

And last night while I was at work I just chucked in the slow cooker loads of stuff with some stock to make some soup, my first ever soup!! :j And my next investment today will be a hand blender to whizz it up, need to as it's got gammon steaks in it!!!! All purchases have been budgeted for! :rotfl:

I'm driving everybody mad at the moment with my £2 coin savings, my old style cooking etc etc!!!! :rotfl: :rotfl:

Bought some Stardrops and microfibre cloths and that's all I use for cleaning now! Stardrops-what a fab thing!! 59p for 600ml and it looks like I've hardly used any you need that little!

I now want to get a breadmaker but my kitchen is so small (see nosy thread!!) that I won't have anywhere to put it!!!

Sorry for that ramble, it's just I love it!!!!! :iloveyou: MSE!!!!!!! Money saving can't be a bad thing to get hooked on can it!!!

Lil_2

Have a look at https://www.madaboutbargains.co.uk You'll be able to see bargains in quite a few of the supermarkets. This site is saving me a fortune.

marilyn52

Hi

You mention taking tin soup for lunches. You can save an awful lot of money making soup and of course it's much nicer and yo had add bits to make more of a meal out of it! Good luck

lynzpower wrote:

Hi there all Osers

Ive been hanging out on these boards for a while now, and after a new all motivating chat with OH last night, we have taken the step of deciding on trying to get our food and household budget down to 80pcm Between us (so that we can save to move)

Now over the years Ive been pretty damn wasteful ( chucking things away when theyve gone off unused, making way too much and binning it etc) but all that has gone. Now we have to save up to move, and times are tighter than ever).

So we are now in the position that we have £20 Pw for lunches to take to work, cleaning and all the food at home. theres only me & OH, no pets or kids!

We are already
taking lunches ( tin of soup etc)
using CC vouchers
eagling for the bogofs etc
looking for vouchers
shopping around
using markets where poss

Phew, essay there, but is anyone else on such a low budget? What else can I be doing ( apart from looking all over this bit of the site :T. anything obvious IM missing here?

Cheers
Lynz
x

Aril

Lidl is having breadmakers costing £19.99 from 27.03 [see https://www.lidl.co.uk]
for further details.
Aril

Heth_2

I take soup to work for lunch. We have a microwave we can use, so to make the soup easier to transport I bulk make it at the weekends, freeze, and then take it in frozen. At lunchtime I then just need to defrost and heat it up, and I'm not worried about it possibly spilling in my bag.
My usual soups are:
- red pepper, tomato and butterbean
- spicy red lentil
Also make more seasonal soups like leek and potato, sweet potato and cumin, mushrooms etc.. and sometimes take leftovers in to heta up as well.

black-saturn

I've been living on that much for ages.

Netty_Sprack

Hi,
Our local Tesco is a 24 hour one and reduces prices slightly, as it is a major location there are a lot of shoppers all day so bargains few.

I found out that a Tesco a short drive away closes at 10pm. At 9pm they drastically reduce their stock prices as they only have an hours trading left and also few shoppers, hence why they are not 24 hours.

I planned my weekly shop late there instead and picked up enough food for the tea time meal of 2 adults for Fri, Sat & Sunday and the whole lot was less than a £1.00 and the sell by dates where fine. The additional fuel was negated by the incresed saving.

Thats another thing ignore dates, if it's not green its edible.

Netty

Ridersbolt

foreverskint wrote:

One of the biggest household savings can be mad by mixing your washing powder with a sililar quantity of washing soda crystals and then using half of your usual amount.

use vinegar as a cleaner (had to be said didn;t it) and dilute other products bubble bath washing up liquid etc to make them go further.

can't think of anymore, but i know there will be loads on here that can

good luck

I use ecoballs instead of washing powder! They're minerals inside plastic balls which replace washing powder in the machine. Mine have lasted 4 years so far and are still going. They cost around £45 to buy (suggest use credit card to spread payment if you can't afford outright) £5 a year (so far) is pretty cheap. Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) do them through their Buy Green By Mail service.
Happy washing!

jayanthi

HI folks

I have health problems and struggle to cover food costs plus have a healthy diet. (I have found its a false economy to eat food thats bad for you anyway). After years of research and experimentation, I have to disagree with the common policy of filling up on starches as apart from anything its not that good for you and can make you bloated. I saw a documentary confirming my experience that actually its only protein that stops you becoming hungry soon after. They discovered that this was why people on Atkins lost weight- not because they were eating sausages of coures, but purely because eating protein stops you needing to snack between meals (and for our purposes, waste money). It takes your stomach 4 hours to digest protein, and the higher the carbo/ sugar level the quicker it just gets burned up and you are hungry an hour or two later.

Ultra cheap fillers: lentils/chickpeas/beans with rice together give you the full amino acid (protein component) combination and staying power. Indian Dahl is easy. If you are new to pulses as I once was, the Bean Book by Rose Elliot is great.

(Otherwise if you are a meat/fish eater like me, sadly the healthier &ethical carnivore options mean very expensive meat. tinned mackerel is a great filler.)

Jayanthi