Bigger shop = bigger spend?

Nicky2905

I have recently changed my shopping habits as I used to spend £120 a week in tesco!! I could slap myself now!! I am quite new to all this money saving but this is what I'm doing now and it seems to be working: Once a month I order a big online shop of household and non perishables and a week's worth of food (this includes huge box of nappies, huge box of wipes, all cleaning/laundry stuff and tinned, frozen and packet stuff - so all the soups, tinned or frozen veg, pasta etc for a month, oh and a months worth of catfood) I scour all the offer pages and get the best deals I can (mr T) and this comes to about £120. I then go to tesco once a week for fresh stuff and the dinners/lunches for the week - as I already have all sauces etc I need it is mainly just bread,milk, meat, veg, fruit etc - this weekly shop usually comes to about £40, but I do also need to nip to my local co-op for fruit top ups (my dd eats tonnes of fruit) - so I'm looking at around £300 - £350 a month for 2 adults, 2 kids and a cat. Still trying to reduce this but it's a big improvement!!

When I walk into Tesco now I am on a mission!! It feels like warfare, I keep telling myself that it's me against them and I compare all prices, search for reductions etc - not only am I saving money it's made shopping more fun too! I feel like I've won something when I find an item reduced that I was going to buy anyway (like a HUGE box of cat biscuits for 70p because the top was a bit battered). The first time I walked out with a week's worth of food for under £40 I was walking on air!!

So, for me a bigger shop doesn't mean a bigger spend (I find I spend more in smaller shops because there's less choice - usually only one brand of something for example) but we are all different!

foxgloves

I used to do monthly meal plans & a monthly big shop topped up with weekly shops for fresh stuff. However, i've found I stick to the budget better if I do a week at time. I think this is because at the end of the first week, I can look at what's left, what needs using, etc, & can plan it into the meals for the following week. So, our main shop is at the Co-op, with often a weekly visit to Waitrose too, to pick up stuff we can't get at the Co-op or items that Waitrose sell for cheaper. The Waitrose 'Essentials' range is excellent. For instance, their wholemeal bread flour is way cheaper than what it costs in the Co-op. Most of our fruit & veg comes from the local market. I also use the village farm shop. Now that yoghurts are so expensive (even when they are packed full of additives), I find I'd rather pay around the same for a high quality yoghurt that has come from a local farm. We also use local butchers, as well as Aldi for certain things. Their Columbian filter coffee is really good for the price, the reduced calorie mayonnaise we like as much as Helman's & it's 79p for a decent size jar, the tuna is cheaper & also the cottage cheese, which for the price (69p) is better than several more expensive brands I've tried. It does make shopping for food more time-consuming, but like a previous post said, we look on this as a strategy. We want to eat lovely things & we want to maximise what we are able to buy within the budget we have available. I actually enjoy shopping around.

zippychick

As this has dropped down the OS board, and is more shopping related, i've moved this over here for you

Zip

MrsAtobe

Foxgloves, you are making me feel inadequate here;) - four days is the most I can meal plan for. Still, at least now that there are two of us, I am cooking from scratch nearly every night (the odd takeaway/ready meal creep in), whereas when I lived on my own, it was a ready meal nearly every night:eek:.

thriftymanc

I have to admit that as much great advice as I read on these forums, I'm fairly hopeless at meal planning etc. I like to keep myself surprised! But, I have got really good at my grocery shopping recently. I've never been a big spender but I've got into a real routine of going round the different shops for different things. As I live in a city centre and I don't have a car, I get my suburban friends saying "oh but you must spend a fortune on food" or "how do you get all your shopping home if you're walking?". I know for example Tesco Express is more expensive than a big Tesco, but that's not all there is here! I go to Waitrose for their reductions and offers (brilliant if you combine both - sometimes it works out cheaper to buy 3 of something than 2!), Tesco for reductions, Aldi for the bulk of my every day groceries like bread, milk etc as they're generally the cheapest, and then supplement that with the odd bits from Quality Save and Poundland (mainly non-food items but great for random store cupboard or alcohol bargains!). And because I live here, I just buy what I need when I need it, I can shop every day but only spend a couple of quid at a time - of course if I see a real bargain in the reductions I'll stock up the freezer. Also because I'm so close to the shops I can nip out when I know the good reductions will be around - e.g. Tesco is brilliant right before it shuts, I can stock up on cheap sandwiches that'll do my lunches for a couple of days! So, I don't have a set weekly or even monthly budget, but overall I've noticed I spend less than I used to when I used to make the effort to go out of town to a big Tesco or Asda. Not to mention saving the bus fare (or even taxi if I bought far too much, oh the non-MSE shame of it!). I admit I do get tempted by unessential treats quite a bit - but because of how I do my shopping, they'll be something like a 23p pack of biscuits from Aldi or a fancy Tesco Finest pudding knocked down to 50p, so hardly breaking the bank - I couldn't bring myself to buy something unessential at full price!

cazj80

I too find that if I go to a big supermarket that I spend more, or at least I used to, until I set a tighter budget which I stick to. There is an absolutely huge Mr Ts a few miles down the motorway from me, and it sells at least twice as much as my normal Mr T, which I thought was big already!

I have a 4 weekly menu plan, and I go shopping for this once a fortnight - buying what I need for the next two weeks. I have shopping lists for each week of the menu, so that I can see what I already have at home, so I only buy what I need.

We budget £140 a month for 2 adults, a toddler and a baby (who has only just been started on weaning, so doesn't really count yet!). This £140 doesn't include baby formula, but then again this isn't going to be a long term purchase and at £7 a box, which lasts less than a week, I can't include that in our normal food budget, I don't think once baby is eating like our toddler she will cost as much as she will just eat what we eat.

In the last few weeks I have started going to Lidl again and then to Mr T. I also now look online for where has the cheapest products and I then walk to them. I am lucky though as Mr T is only 2 miles walk from my house, I have 2 Sainsburys about 1.5 miles from me in different directions, I can walk 3 miles into town to get to Asda, or drive 5 miles to a bigger one. Morrisons is too far away from my house - over 10 miles so I don't use them. Also by walking there, even though I have the pushchair I can only buy so much, as I have a toddler in the pushchair, baby strapped to me in a baby carrier, and I live up a hill, and although I've done it before, pushing it all up a hill with 4 bags full of shopping is a bit too much!

shammyjack

When I go to a big supermarket I save money.

I am an impatient old codger and cannot be bothered reading all the crap shelf edge labels. So I just walk through at a great rate of knots speed reading as I go . I grab the mega bargains listed on here if I need them and just get the groceries that I need.

IMHO Aldi, Lidl etc are the worst for impulse buys as they have weekly specials that are hard to resist.


shammy