Shopping-Monthly vs Weekly or daily (merged)

boredjellybean

Hiya

I've been mulling this over for a while & trying to figure out what suits our needs best, I find that I am shopping for something or another almost every day :mad:

I used to make a weekly meal planner & shop once a week adding on any household goods we needed too (ie toiletries & cleaning products etc) but still I'd be topping up bread, fruit & vegthrough the week

I've tried making a meal planner & buying every few days but that also sees me spending small fortune & of course picking up toiletries etc in our small local town works out to be very expensive

This leaves me pondering the idea of trying to do some sort of monthly/long term ish planner & buying once a month store cupboard goods, toiletries non perishables etc then just getting fresh thins as & when

Please let me know what you find works best & if there is any way I've missed out - I'd love to get our shopping bills down as they are getting stupid now

many thanks in advance

BJB
(p.s. we are a family of 5 - 2 adults & 3 children under 11 I am a stay at home Mum so can bake & cook etc etc)

Pink.

Hi boredjellybean,

This thread should show you how others do it:

Shopping-Monthly vs Weekly (merged)

This thread should help with mealplanning:

Meal Planning - how do you do it?

And this thread has lots of advice on cutting back on your grocery shopping bills:

July 2011 Grocery Challenge


I'l add your thread to the first link once you've had more replies.

Pink

[Deleted User]

as little as you can possibly get away with and only buy what you need and not what you think you need

quintwins

i've decided the best way for us is a monthly big shop for meat ect then a shop oonce a week looking for milk,reduced bread and fruit and veg but only buying other stuff if greatly reduced

movnik894

Hello, still a newbie but love this forum! I am very keen on saving money and being extra thrifty. so thought I would share my spending habits!
I do my shop once a month online. I tend to fill a mock shopping basket with tesco, asda and ocado based on my shopping list and then see who is the cheapest nearer the time, and who gives me any offers.
I buy longlife milk, lots of tinned stuff and frozen stuff so I have a massive storecupboard of ingredients.
Meat and bread I tend to buy when they are reduced at the end of the day and then I will freeze these. I will usually do only one or two shops of this, depending what i can find on the reduced counter.
I like to make vats of bolognese or bean casserole, or similar and then bag them and freeze them for easy meals (providing i remember to take them out of the freezer to defrost!)
I have to admit i am still a student at heart and will happily make a meal out of sardines on toast or rice and beans. But, i am still standing!
I don't really believe in top up shopping anymore. If i havent got it in the cupboard, i don't have it!
Hope this helps. I am happy and proud of the way i shop and think about shopping. I hate waste and I don't like the idea of buying things for no reason.
As my mum always said, 'if you can't afford it, you weren't meant to have it!

foxgloves

My method is to keep a good store cupboard as a basis of what we're going to be eating. Then, I make a monthly meal plan ready for the beginning of each month. The first meals on this always incorporate anything we've already got in that needs using up. The first shop of the month, we buy everything needed for monthly meal plan that will keep or can be frozen. Each subsequent week, we shop just for the fresh stuff, milk, eggs, fruit, veg, etc. I mostly stick to the monthly meal plan fairly exactly, but I always include a couple of days of 'Jacket potatoes with choice of topping' as again, this is useful for eating extra portions of things like chilli, curry, etc, that I've frozen, and I leave a couple of blank days too, as we nearly always end up cooking a couple of meals to use up surplus veg we've grown ourselves or ingredients which need using up quickly rather than wasting them. We do shop around....Co-op for main shop, but local market for fruit & veg as it's a lot cheaper, Aldi/Lidl for certain store cupboard ingredients (such as tinned kidney beans at 19p a can) & butcher for a lot of our meat. It seems to work....tho' like eveyone else, we can't help but notice how much food prices are rising this year.

PaddyPaws

I used to do an on-line shop every week, but decided to try moving to fortnightly. We have a veg box delivered each week and we use long life milk so don't need to keep going to the shops for extras. We must have wasted a huge amount of food as our fortnightly shop cost about the same as the weekly shop!

I'm currently trying to go longer between our main shops, aiming to get it to monthly, but am doing a small top-up shop about every 10 days or so. We meal plan 2 to 3 weeks at a time, I have a notebook for this and if I batch cook, eg chilli, and if there are 5 meals for the freezer they get written into the meal planner for weeks ahead so by the time I get to a week to plan the meals there are often two or three meals already listed.

As we batch cook several meals will be out of the freezer so I check every few days to see if there is anything in the fridge that needs eating up, if there is I might swap things on the meal plan and leave the freezer meal for another day.

We also bulk buy meat and fish from Cost-Co and portion it up for the freezer, so spend about £100 every 3-4 months (I use lentils to bulk out mince and found it isn't as noticeable with the good mince from cost-co as it was with mnce from the supermarket)

HTH
PP

randomer

Just curious to know which works for you and why. I currently do both so I get the very worst of both worlds!:o

But It will change..........

snowleopard61

Both have worked for me at different times. Over the years I've regularly fed everything from a family of five ('nuclear' family plus my elderly mother living with us) to three of us (just children and me) to just me most of the time (young adult children either away or out for meals a lot of the time). I don't drive, so the most efficient way for me to shop for a family is online shopping, and it's obviously money-saving to do so less often if only because of the delivery charges, especially as they are cheaper/free the more you spend. I never could face that massive monthly shop thing, so used to do so either weekly or fortnightly.

But now that I'm feeding mostly just me, it's easier and more money-saving to shop as I go along. Obviously there's much less to carry anyway, but also I can weigh up the cost and nuisance value of going to Aldi on the way home against the tedium of having the same thing for dinner that I had last night, whereas I wouldn't have inflicted that on my family. I do batch-cook some of the time, but on a gradual basis - a couple of extra portions to freeze at a time.

My parents used to shop as they went along, very economically, which gave me pause for thought as I'd always assumed it would be cheaper to plan in advance and batch-cook.

Farway

I shop as I go along, but only me to sort out, family fledged years ago. When they were at home, plus dog & cats I shopped on line, just too many tins to carry home

I normally walk and use a rucksack, get any reduced offers I fancy & have no set meals in mind, for instance today was reduced free range chicken + sweet & sour ready meal, 30% price reduced Lidl, which will do me over the weekend plus some chicken in freezer

Tomorrow is reduced mince + carrots [Lidl again], probably freeze mince, or maybe some mince dish using carrots