April 2015 Grocery Challenge

scotmumof3

Declaring under budget this month at £314.60/£330. This seemed to be a long hard slog this month but going over to May now so catch you all there

Hoipolloi

Pleased to be under budget for another month :beer:

Well done everyone !

Frizzle_2

I'm declaring at £212.93! So £7 under target. The only reason I was under this month was because they didn't have the aldi vouchers in the paper. So only spent £30 odd in aldi on Sunday and waiting until the weekend for my next shop. It's good because some things I didn't need stocking up on but I'm virtually out of some things that I get monthly e.g. Cereal, meat, etc and the freezer is virtually empty but I don't want to fill it up too much until we move in about 4 weeks time x

cw18

Declaring month end as a grocery spend of £152.90
which is well under my declared budget of £244.90, and means I've clawed back the overspend situation as of end of March :T

Of that £152.90, £100.40 (66%) shows as shop spends (before discounts, multi-saves and whoopsies) and £52.50 (34%) is long-term stock I've bought from myself. The split for the year to end of month is 64% shops against 36% long-term stock.

Biggest issue is definitely the %age I'm spending on 'junk' food (cakes, crisps, sweets, biscuits, puddings). In January it accounted for almost 13.5% of my spends, Feb was almost 11.5%, March was 11.25%, and April was a staggering 15.75% (although my spends were low, my junk spends didn't drop accordingly).

My %age breakdown for year to end of month shows as

%age junk 12.62
%age Carbs 8.02
%age fruit 1.23
%age veg 8.14
%age milk 6.60
%age dairy 3.77
%age protein 34.65
%age ready meals 10.01
%age on other 14.96

The highest is protein which doesn't surprise me.
Second highest is 'other', which has such a large area to mop up I'd not have been shocked to see it slightly higher.
Third is junk - so this is most definitely an area I need to work on !!!

The ready meals I'd like to have lower, but I'd rather DS1 ate those than continued to throw away home-made 'ready' meals and eat nothing (which is what he was doing at least 50% of the time!).

I'd actually have expected the carbs to be higher (potatoes, pasta, rice, bread etc) as we're quite high carb eaters, and a 'standard' potion of pasta/rice here is 100g dry rather than the 70g recommendation.

You can tell we're not big fruit eaters, but I have a lot of dried and tinned fruit in my stock-piles so expect/hope to see that figure increase.

Milk is mostly DS1's - he can get though 16 pints of semi-skimmed a week with no difficulty, whereas I get through a litre (or just over) of long life soya.

Dairy covers anything else that could come into a dairy classification, even if it's 'dairy free' such as soya spread/yoghurt.

snowfox

I haven't been around much the past few weeks, been super busy. But I did manage to keep track of my spending, and I'm happy to declare the end result for April is:

£182.23 / £200

Yay! :j

mrsd

This is my last spend for the April budget, am pleased to say I came in under budget, especially as i had extra mouths to feed. Only spent £37.11 in Ald! this week, and all other days were NSD. I have meal planned for the week and with it being bank holiday Monday need 2 less packed lunches. I am about to put breadmaker on as we eat more when we are at home. I got some nice seeded flour with my shop and am keen to try it. Now off to register for May challenge.

fleur38

Final April spend £234.73/£200.




Whilst this is over budget, I'm still pleased with it. I haven't made it to Aldi yet (cupboards, freezer etc. still full) but I will try and get there in May.
First month so wasn't sure what to budget.
Sorry for late posting of result due to Bank Holiday.
I will join for May too.