March 2016 Grocery Challenge

jacci45

Made target in Jan, Feb spent £323/£350...yay!! Payday tomorrow and NSD for me today. As its a 4 week month and I am dropping my weekly expenditure by £5 a week my budget for March will be £260...this will be very interesting!
Good luck all! x

Trying_really_hard

First spend of the month at £78.54 at Mr S. £9 of that was some baby clothing as the 25% TU clothing sale was on and I find the TU baby stuff washes really well. I'll take that £9 off the total as it comes from a different pot.

So, technically £69.54 this week. Still a bit more than I normally spend so I need to reign it in a bit. I need to start thinking about my batch cooking and slow cooker freezer meals.

MandM90

Put me down for £200 please!

I always forget to check back in, but usually stay in budget thanks to YNAB!

wiggly

I'm back in. My biggest overspend in our monthly budget is food. There are me, my OH, my DD and DS (and the DS has a massive appetite). This month it is nearly £600 but that does include a big celebration cook-up for friends one weekend but still, it's always over £500.

I'd like to get it under £500, but with March being a 5 week month, and it's also my birthday, I'd like to try to just stick to £550 please. Then I shall try to knock it down a bit each month.

I'm also doing slimming world and am finding it hard to meal plan and save money AND meet the SW plan aims too but I know it has to be do-able!

mummyroysof3

Really struggling to stay under £500 for 5 of us try again for March I guess

Bubblesmum

Thank you for the inspiring thread - got OH to sign up to challenge us to stay at £280.00starting on payday 26th Feb.

Really liked all your links at the start, I want to be creative, with less meat (and with cheaper cuts), more fish and veg meals.

We have a full freezer, although I think lots of apples from our Bramley tree, who knows I will find out!

Its just the two of us, and I'm trying to loose weight. We are both disabled and have at times go for the easier option of ready made meals etc, although we both love cooking from scratch therefore less labour intensive meals are a must.

I have a slow cooker, and we love a variety of foods - often thats been our downfall expensive ingredients.

Good luck everyone

Coxy11

Hi everyone,


Sorry for the my late start. I was away on holiday last week.


Budgets updated to here


Welcome/welcome back to:
strawberryR, wiggly, Bubblesmum, ScotinLondon and medsdemon


Good luck to all.
Coxy

Shortypie

Ok, I really want to try and keep it to £300 for us, family of 5 (not including household/hygiene stuff) but to be on the safe side as it's my first try, I'll go with £350 please. I really have no idea how much we spend currently, I wouldn't say we are too bad, but it's the top-up shops I need to keep an eye one. we only have a teeny fridge-freezer as our kitchen is also teeny, so it's hard to freeze leftovers, and can't get freezer stuff in bulk.

I do mostly cook from scratch, and I've started using oats and a blitzed onion and carrot in my mince meals - I made lamb ragu last week with a 400g pack of minced lamb and with adding oats, carrot and onion the amount seemed to double, and none of the kids noticed, even the fussy one :T

mancbird

Can I join in please? Hubby gets paid last day of the months so we will start on the 29th.

There's 2 adults, a 4 year old, an almost 2 year old, a dog and a cat.

I have taken my eye off the ball recently so not sure how much we are really spending do am going to set a target of £300 for this month. This is more than I would like it to be, but I also plan to do a big store cupboard shop as they are looking a bit bare!

We are also planning to start doing the 2nd purse I've read about on here

MERFE

I've not been on here for ages but need to be keeping an eye on spends again so for March I have a budget of £260 for 5 of us. Lots of meal planning so no over buying hopefully.

My month starts on Friday.