How much to feed two adults a month?

LittleMissAspie

How much do other couples spend on their groceries per month? For food, drinks and household sundries like toilet roll and cleaning products.

My current budget is £150 but I want to reduce it to £120 but we're currently "in debt" to ourselves by £64 as we keep overspending.

kim107

I have cut down a lot on cleaning products and am now a white vinegar and stardrops faithful

So pretty much all our grocery shopping is for food. We usually spend about £40 a week so that would make it £160 per month. We try to be savvy with our shopping but OH does quite a physical job and eats like a horse so we get through a lot of food!

Good luck with your challenge. Would like to know how you get on

Linda32

Hi,

We are just two adults as well.

I budget for £65 per week, sometimes we pretty much spend most of this, but then last week we had about £15.00 left.

So I'm guessing about £230 / per month.

This is for food, wine, cleaning and toiletries. We are very very :money: on toiletries and cleaning. Bars of soap rather than shower gels etc. Tesco or Sainsburys basic washing powder. Tesco's Daisy cleaning things. Although we do 'brand up' for Fairy Liquid and decent loo roll, the cheaper ones are false economy IMO

OH gets a free hot meal at work at lunchtime, so not much needed in the way of pack-ups.
HTH

ladymarmalade

Wow, sounds like we spend quite a lot. £60-£70 a week (usually £15-£20 ish at the butchers and the rest in the supermarket). This includes all meals, most toiletries and all cleaning products. TBH, we are pretty happy with what we spend....we have nice meals and we are always within the budget we set ourselves!

LondonDreamer

Budgets vary a lot depending where you shop, what and how much you eat, etc. I spent £200 this month for 3 adults and didn't need much in the way of household items, so I think £150 for everything is already pretty reasonable for a couple. But it might help if you post an example shopping list so we can see what you buy and if there's room to cut back anywhere?

And perhaps join in the grocery challenge for February? It really helps to stay on track with your target!

Rummer

Best thing to do is meal plan for a few weeks so you get into the habit of only buying what you need for each meal. That is how we managed to cu tour bills down, while still eating food we loved

BitterAndTwisted

I'd suggest that if you're constantly over-spending and you're not comfortable with doing that then more planning is needed or changes to your eating and shopping habits. If you are comfortable with this hypothetical over-spend: up your budget.

As someone has already mentioned, no two couples are alike, eat the same things or shop in the same places for it, so knowing what other people spend may not necessarily be helpful to you. What I do suspect is that a large proportion of some people's budgets are spent on meat and fish so that's the first thing I'd look at and see if I could either eat less or buy cheaper

Maybe some recipes on the cheap-family-recipes.org website might give you some inspiration. I live alone so only feed one plus a cat and my budget is between £15 and £20 a week.

LittleMissAspie

Thanks everyone, it does look like I am being a bit stingy with the budget then. I have been annoyed with the boyfriend recently as he has been buying what I consider to be unnecessary items which have taken January's spend over £120. He thinks £120 is too low so I wondered what the normal range was for others.

Boyfriend has been doing all the shopping and cooking for a while now which is why we've been spending a lot - I'm feeling better now and starting to meal plan again and write grocery lists so I'm confident that £120 is doable for us, as long he sticks to the flippin list.

I will look for this grocery challenge thing, it sounds helpful

BitterAndTwisted

If your boyfriend is still going to do the shopping perhaps encourage him read the shelf-edge stickers for the prices of things per kilo before he decides which product to buy. Hint: the cheapest products are often at floor-level rather than at eye-level. Some prices are lower in the "ethnic" section for the same stuff available elsewhere on the shelves.

Another thing to suggest is that some food-products are interchangeable, so if your recipe calls for beef and there's a really keen deal on chicken or lamb when he goes round the supermarket he could buy that instead. This could make cooking a bit more exciting and make you try things you might not have considered before.

Phoolgrrrl

Me and OH are around £140 a month. We used to do £120, but with price hikes I don't think we can unless we make changes. We also spend about £40 a month on drinks for the house, but this is offset in that we don't go out much!

We buy meat from butchers and free range eggs. Depends how you feel about that but you could make a saving there with value. Toilet rolls we buy in bulk when on offer. Cleaning stuff is from home bargains.

LittleMissAspie

I'm vegetarian so we buy a lot of quorn or supermarket brand fake meat. Boyfriend tends to eat the same as me but does sometimes buy meat, not much though. We hardly drink alcohol either.

We are very lucky to have proper farmers markets nearby twice a month, plus there's a farm in one village that sells cheap free range eggs plus there's a little butchers in another village that boyfriend likes. So one thing to work on is being organised enough to drive round to all these places when the market is on, instead of going for the easy option which is the nearest supermarket... which is Waitrose...