Cat Food Budgeting

theblackrose

Hoping I'm posting in the right place. I've decided to sit down & work out exactly how much all the cat food etc is costing us a month. We have 7 cats (4 adults & 3 kittens). 4 were adopted strays or cats abandoned by their owners & the most recent addition had not been fixed so she had 3 kittens. We don't plan on getting rid of any of them as we are huge cat lovers & happily buy value/smartprice for ourselves so we can afford them .

I wanted to list what we spend & see if we are doing well or if anyone can tell us how we can spend less or where we are going wrong. Some of the figures have been rounded off. I worked it out by amount used per week times weeks in a year then divided by months in a year.

Wet food (230 pouches a month) = £70 a month

Tesco value tuna chunks (91 cans a month) = £50 a month
(1 cat will only eat this
& the other has no teeth so can only eat this)

Tesco Value cat litter (8 bags a month) = £12 month

Dry Food (Bought in bulk (15kg) every 3 months) = £20


It works out to about £150 a month

So..............good or bad?

Pink.

Hi theblackrose,

I've moved your thread over to the Pets & Pet Care board where you should get more replies.

Pink

missprice

my own cat costs me around £3 a month to feed
she is an outdoors so no litter
dry food only
tesco or morrys
one box costs i think £180 ish and she eats one and a bit boxes a month

when i did have an indoors (by choice) cat i used soil from the garden in the litter tray
so if that is an option for you tou could save a bit?:)

gettingready

missprice wrote: »

one box costs i think £180 ish and she eats one and a bit boxes a month

OMG - what are you feeding that cat? what brand is it?

rising_from_the_ashes

gettingready wrote: »

OMG - what are you feeding that cat? what brand is it?

2nd that! :eek:

Badger_Lady

I assume Missprice meant £1.80 a month!

My cat has a basic diet of Felix Senior cat food, purely because he was used to it when I got him at age 7. He really doesn't touch dry food. If I change supermarkets each month, I can get him food at £3 a week.

On top of that, I do get him 'treats' from the butcher, or from the deli section of the supermarket if it's reduced. I can get a bag of chopped liver for 50p that will do him for a night.

He did go through a phase of using cat litter (I blamed it on age at the time but now he's back to outdoors again), and I did start using garden soil. I swear it was better for keeping smells in!

BitterAndTwisted

£20 a month per cat? That sounds like a HUGE amount to me. I can't believe that two cats won't eat anything other than value tuna chunks. They must be eating the other food as cats can't live on tuna alone. Besides, even cats with no teeth can quite easily eat dried food. I know because I had one once.

Did you know that you can get 10 kilos of clay-based cat litter at Lidl for less than two pounds? That's what I buy for my boy Stanley. He also will only eat dried food, so he costs me only £2 a week in both food and litter.

rising_from_the_ashes

£150 / month for 7 cats is pretty good going (just over £20 each):) - my 2 come in around £70/month but that includes annual jabs, worming stuff, insurance as well as food & litter.


It depends on how good you are at buying in bulk & stocking up when offers are on eg:

230 pouches a month = 20 x 12 boxes (would be 240)

If I bought 20 boxes of Whiskas normally, it would cost me around £70 (£3.50 x 20) which is the same as you're spending.:)

However, they're on offer just now (Pet Planet) for 4 boxes for £10, which would work out at £50 - a pretty big saving (especially if this only lasts a month:eek:) so worth looking into.


Same with their dry food - it costs around £17 for 2 kg, so works out at £8.50/month/cat.

However, I just got 2 x 4kg bags on BOGOF for £28 which brings the cost down to a much more reasonable £3.50/month/cat.


Some online places offer cashback (Zoo+ etc) as well as sometimes giving discounts (10% off first order, 5% off bulk orders etc) so this may be worth looking into as well.

Re the poor wee one with no teath - have you tried any of the pate style foods for him? (Tuna's not great all the time due to lack of essential nutrients - even if you could get him eating something else some of the time, it would help).

HTH

theblackrose

BitterAndTwisted wrote: »

£20 a month per cat? That sounds like a HUGE amount to me. I can't believe that two cats won't eat anything other than value tuna chunks. They must be eating the other food as cats can't live on tuna alone. Besides, even cats with no teeth can quite easily eat dried food. I know because I had one once.

Did you know that you can get 10 kilos of clay-based cat litter at Lidl for less than two pounds? That's what I buy for my boy Stanley. He also will only eat dried food, so he costs me only £2 a week in both food and litter.

They do eat dry food (even the toothless one but she swallows it whole & it tends to come back up often) but will not eat wet food. We've tried but I'm thinking we need to reduce the tuna intake as 1 tin often results in waste. Arthurs was the only cat food she would eat but they stopped making that sadly & we have to be careful with her as some wet food upsets her tummy. Maybe once a day we should try her on some other tinned cat food or something. It would save so much money if they started eating cat food!

The cat litter we but is Tesco value which is 10liters for £1.44 . We tried the Lidl one but it just makes so much mess. I'm happy with the quality of the tesco one.

theblackrose

rising_from_the_ashes wrote: »

£150 / month for 7 cats is pretty good going (just over £20 each):) - my 2 come in around £70/month but that includes annual jabs, worming stuff, insurance as well as food & litter.


It depends on how good you are at buying in bulk & stocking up when offers are on eg:

230 pouches a month = 20 x 12 boxes (would be 240)

If I bought 20 boxes of Whiskas normally, it would cost me around £70 (£3.50 x 20) which is the same as you're spending.:)

However, they're on offer just now (Pet Planet) for 4 boxes for £10, which would work out at £50 - a pretty big saving (especially if this only lasts a month:eek:) so worth looking into.


Same with their dry food - it costs around £17 for 2 kg, so works out at £8.50/month/cat.

However, I just got 2 x 4kg bags on BOGOF for £28 which brings the cost down to a much more reasonable £3.50/month/cat.


Some online places offer cashback (Zoo+ etc) as well as sometimes giving discounts (10% off first order, 5% off bulk orders etc) so this may be worth looking into as well.

Re the poor wee one with no teath - have you tried any of the pate style foods for him? (Tuna's not great all the time due to lack of essential nutrients - even if you could get him eating something else some of the time, it would help).

HTH

Thank you, will definitely look into the cashback sites & petplanet. We use Amazon, Petsupermarket & a new one I found yesterday called Petshopbowl (great offers on Felix, 4 boxes of 12 for £8.99 & Whiskas £10.99).
We try to buy in bulk most of the time especially when the food is 48 pouches for £12 or less . Spent about £43 last night on 192 pouches in total which will last for a bit & we've still got leftovers from the last bulk buy. Thankfully the kittens aren't fussy yet! They love stealing the tuna & any cat food apart from Whiskas Kitten :rotfl:

I'd be so happy if we could solve the tuna issue!

Also forgot to add we buy the Pro Plan Adult Cat dry food 15kg for about £48 which lasts about 3 months.

spike7451

Daisy's budget per fortnight is;

Tesco's premium chunks in jelly x 12- £5.19
Purina One 300G- £1.89
Tesco value cat litter- £1.44

Total- £8.52 a fortnight.Daisy also gets Royal Canin exigent 400G (£3.00) which lasts her a month,as I get my ESA fortnightly that's what I based the above on & therfore didn't include the RC.She doesn't drink fluids which is why a wet food is important for her.The Tesco catfood I feed her now is of better quality that Whiskas ect &,as I've discovered over the past few weeks since I switched her from the aweful Kit E Kat,is the only one she'll scoff a full tin of.
I think pouches are a bit of a false economy,For example,six tins of Whiskas is £3.49 for 6 x 390G tins.A box of the same in pouches is again £3.49,but this time for 12 x 100G pouches.So in effect you get double the weight in a six pack of tins compared to a box of pouches for the same money therefore six boxes of pouches is the equivalent of three six packs of tins so..(just under 4 pouches per 390G tin)
Six boxes of pouches comes to £20.94
Three six packs of tins comes to £10.47
Which is a difference of £10.47