Please Help!

Tixy

Hi

It is definitely do-able at £164. Is the £5 a month pet food a typo? it seems cheap!
Might be worth heading to the oldstyle board and looking for ideas on the grocery challenge and similar threads. Some of them are really expert at getting more food for your money etc. To the extent that if you post up a typical week's shopping list they could probably go through each line and make suggestions!! Try things like the drop a brand challenge etc to reduce your costs.

March 2011 Grocery Challenge
Supermarket Shopping: Downshift & more, halve weekly bills

Regarding the lloyds card - are you in time to opt out of the APR hike?
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/credit-card-interest-rate-increases
Edit - sorry we've covered this before on this thread I see!

ElmerFudd

katsu wrote: »

Get the wife onto the old style boards to look at cheap meals.

I am spending around £50 but we have specific dietary requirements to cater for that mean we can't follow the cheapest advice. If nothing else having a beans on toast night once a week should help cut your food costs...

Thanks, I'll get her to take a look
Sadly we also have specific dietary requirements, so if we can stick to £50 a week, that will give us a shortfall of £40 a month. I can probably squeeze £10 more a month from somewhere, but that would still leave £30 to find from somewhere. It's highly likely the gas/ electric bills won't be as high, but I think I'll target that as well as the food.
It's actually annoying that the student loan is coming out from now on. If I had known my payrise would have thrown me £20 over the threshold making me £100 odd worse off a month I would have said no!!! I also wouldn't have paid for a travel season ticket.

katsu

Try using the mysupermarket website to see what offers etc the big stores have on and which are cheapest for certain products http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk

katsu

Can you use frozen veg and lots of boiled potatoes, mash etc?

Look for a local market for cheap fruit and veg

ElmerFudd

Tixy wrote: »

Hi

It is definitely do-able at £164. Is the £5 a month pet food a typo? it seems cheap!
Might be worth heading to the oldstyle board and looking for ideas on the grocery challenge and similar threads. Some of them are really expert at getting more food for your money etc. To the extent that if you post up a typical week's shopping list they could probably go through each line and make suggestions!! Try things like the drop a brand challenge etc to reduce your costs.

March 2011 Grocery Challenge
Supermarket Shopping: Downshift & more, halve weekly bills

Regarding the lloyds card - are you in time to opt out of the APR hike?
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/credit-card-interest-rate-increases
Edit - sorry we've covered this before on this thread I see!

Sorry typo, meant £5 a week. We already do moneysupermarket, but I'll take a look at the boards.
Since my last post though Lloyds have increased again (didn't think that was allowed in such a short time). I just received the letter the other day so I am still in good time to opt out (but at 21% APR). The only problem is I need the card for a £1k payment (complicated emergency - not been a good year so far), so I won't be able to do anything until that payment goes out (which could be a few weeks which would likely run over the deadline). I'll just have to cope with it and try and find other avenues.

Katsu - I can't eat potatoes (get severe asthma), but can eat certain vegetables and eat lots of fruit. We already get some frozen fruit. Biggest expense for our household is meat (hence my username - I'm huntin' wabbit!) I think but we're planning on buying bulk each month and storing it in the freezer. I'll see if that cuts down the costs. I have some ridiculous food allergies. One of my parents nearly died from gluten intolerance. I have a mild intolerance to gluten so try and avoid it when I can. I'm also allergic to certain vegetables.

Tixy

I also thought they couldn't increase it more than once every 6months or something? Might be worth looking at and if that was the case maybe you can appeal the increase without having to close the card?

I'm far from expert at grocery costs (and especially meat) but have you tried shopping at a butcher to see if that can reduce your meat costs?

katsu

Elmer, we have a market stall that sells lots of meat so I presume it is cheap. Something like that near you?

Can you use some veggie meals sometimes (quorn/tvp/soya) to reduce the overall spend?

theoretica

Can you reject the Lloyds rate increase this time?

Are you happy cooking less usual types of meat? Heart and such? If you can find them they can be very tasty and less expensive.

ElmerFudd

Thanks for the ideas Tixy, katsu and theoretica. I'm going to try to go veggie for a month and see how that goes. If that doesn't work I'll switch to the less usual types of meat. We used to get our meat from Sainsburys but lately have been going to a butchers or using one of the online ones (like The Well Hung Meat company) however even those are a little expensive.
As for the card hikes I'll definitely look into it. It doesn't feel like the last hike was 6 months ago (but I have been working really hard so time has rushed by) but I'll have to go through my paperwork to double check.
On a little positive note I may be able to slow stooze onto my other low APR cards as they do both now pay the highest APR first, which will still be less than the 24% Lloyds are asking (both of them are 16.9% oddly). I may be able to reduce the high APR by another £300 to £600. I'm just going to wait for my other bills to come.