January 2013 Grocery Challenge

Mumof2_2

Just declaring my final balance of £295.37 so squeezed in! Going to lower it to £280 for February as shorter month and will see how it goes.

cw18

Found my missing receipt, and had actually guesstimated my spend at 1p more than I'd spent.

So I'm declaring January as £158.52 spent from my £207.00 budget, leaving a fairly healthy £48.48 towards holiday food and stocking up at food festivals later in the year


I've split my spend into 'fruit & veg', 'general' (includes bread, meat and milk) and 'treats'. The big ouch is that Treats came to £42.57 (or almost 27% of my spends!). Fruit and Veg accounted for a further £40.49 (or another 25.5% of my spends - worrying that this is actually pennies less than treats ), and General came in at £75.46 (47.6% of spends).

And a further trawl through shows I've not yet started items that come to £40.38 (just over 25% of my spend) - so that could be credited to January's budget and be deducted from February's (but I'm not messing my spreadsheet around that much )

My personal challenge for February (besides staying within budget) is to reduce the %age spent on treats........

fluffpot

The end of the month and I've come in under budget at £223.58/£300 although I didn't have a clue about how much I was spending so the budget was a bit of a guess...

Interestingly fruit and veg accounts for about 25% of the budget - a bit less than I thought. Will try and split it out a bit better next month as CW has done as it makes for interesting analysis

Oh and 9 No Spend Days!

Feb will be hard as I won't have a kitchen for most of it, so envisage spending more...

Hollygym

Last day for me. DH went to Al*i on way home yesterday and managed to spend £18 without my knowledge!! :eek: Still, it might mean that we can keep to Febs budget...lets hope.Jan was a pure guess based on lots of food in 2 freezers. Still got lots in the freezer, but hope £250 is a more realtistic budget for 2 adults and 4 children...

I have enjoyed this month menu planning and watching food. It has reduced my food bill from what it could have been.. looking forward to trying the tortilla recipes and lots of others too.:D

Bluegreen143

No spends today or yesterday so I'm declaring at just a couple of £s over-budget - bit annoying but not too bad. best of luck anyone who's still in January's budget and well done those who are under, especially if it's your first time

See you over in February!

frankerooney

I'm all done for January at £355.71 which is slightly over budget but we're getting into the swing of keeping receipts and how to reduce spending so hoping we'll do a bit better next month.

Allypops

Last day for me too. I've been suffering with the January blues and so have not been keeping on track too well and have lost count but think we have gone over budget by about £80-£100. I hope to get back on track next month after giving myself a severe kick up the posterior!
Will be keeping a proper spending diary for February too.

forever_saving

Declaring £248.40 for January. Come in just under budget. I did have 17 nsd's so quite happy with that. I will up next months budget as i was using stocks from xmas.
See you over on the February board. Well done to everybody else.
FS

Karb

Declaring January as red at £129.99 which sounds like it should be a selling price of a single item!

Well over my budget of £100, but I think I was a bit too challenging, considering I normally spend £200. Thought that, with the stuff I had left over in the cupboards and freezer it might be achieveable, but I hadn't counted on DS1 (who normally spends his time split 50/50 between his Mams house and mine) spending his whole time at mine, which in turn encourages DS2 to come round for most of his meals too.

I also hadn't taken into account that I'd buy loads of fruit and salad as part of my weight loss attempt, rather than only eating what's in the freezer.

So over my target, but well under my normal monthly spend.

lizalloareds

Does anyone know where I can get a spreadsheet from? maybe that will help me