February 2016 Grocery Challenge

mrs_motivated

Weekly shop done a total spend of £74. Meal plan done for both packed lunches and dinners, so shouldn't need to buy any more groceries this week, except maybe another loaf of bread.

rising_from_the_ashes

Hi everyone .... I'm def in - just trying to re-work my budget to include some sort of bulk buy fund .... will be back shortly!

Katsmum2

Hi, like to join please. Need to track what I'm spending first though.
X

rising_from_the_ashes

mmmmm think atm the best thing is to go back to doing a quarterly budget - long term I do think I need to have a plan for bulk buys (tend to stock up when in town every couple of months as no shops like B&M, Home bar*ains, Li*l etc here ..... but - I know I'm really bad a remembering to move stuff back / forwards / take from one budget to another etc so know I'll probably forget to do that!

So, for now - let's try a quarterly one which will be £455

(sorry Coxy )

HornetSaver

On course for a frugal first week. As far as expensive ingredients go I'm well stocked. Spend so far:

£1.50 on cereal
£1 on milk
£1 on eggs
£1 on peppers
30p on a lemon
50p on mini-pitta
85p on onions
89p for a pineapple
25p for garlic
£1.05 on grapes (after bonus nectar points)
11p on bags due to wear and tear. I try and keep a stock of two from each of the main supermarkets I use, and take the other supermarket's bags with me for that shop, after a bad experience of some jobsworth asking me why I hadn't paid for a bag when it was obvious that I was re-using it.
35p on pasta
£1.75 on baked beans
99p on noodles
£1 on potatoes (can normally do better than that for the amount I got, but neither my first or second choice shop had a cheaper option in the size I wanted )
£5.78 on 8x2L bottles of branded, mixed soft drinks from Costco (last time I had someone around they were driving, and the drink options were limited)

Spend to date £18.68/150

Plenty of sausages, Quorn (had to cook for a vegetarian last week) and tuna available to me, other useful staples I'm well off for include couscous, grean beans, passata, flour, cheese, sugar, butter and two part-baked baguettes

Meal plan (bit late but still...)

Friday - Toad in the hole with onion gravy
Saturday - Tuna burgers
Sunday - Lemon couscous with passata, quorn, green beans, peppers and onions.
Monday - Sausage and pineapple kebabs with wedges (okay, a bit early for BBQ food, but even under a grill it's still a lovely meal)
Tuesday - Pancakes, probably something involving pineapple.
Wednesday - Scratch made pizza. Probably vegetarian.
Thursday - Macaroni cheese.

Next week will inevitably be a big shop, so I probably won't do a meal plan for the early part of the following week, though I'll obviously be doing tuna burgers and pancakes on two of the days. Instead I'll try to get as many meals as I can out of what's left on a day-to-day basis, so that I'm out of almost everything at almost the same time (apart from couscous, tuna and possibly some green beans). That will get me to the sort of level where I won't have to do too much stocking up to take one of those introductory offers on home delivery when you spend over £60. I've never had home delivery for food shopping before, but some of the deals work out at 20-25% off your first shop, and it should all be stuff that I'd have bought in bits and bobs anyway.

stardrops42

OK so I failed miserably in January, totally lost track of what I was spending and went way over budget!

Anyway I'm going to try to be really good this month.Please can you put me down for £80 a week. I think my last budget was a tad ambitious

Cappella

Well week one of this challenge started on Friday for us as I usually visit the market and supermarkets weekly on a Friday. I took my usual amount of housekeeping out of the bank and left my cards at home because I'm more conscious of what I'm spending if I use cash instead of a card
I've used some of our stockpile of flour to make our bread for the month and frozen it (we don't eat a huge amount of bread, and it meant having the oven on once instead of every week for bread baking) but I still spent £53.76 shared between the butcher and L***ls (is it ok to name the supermarket fully?) That covers milk, dog food, toothpaste, loo roll and meat and fish for the month. It's MUCH less than I've been spending and am really chuffed at the amount still in my purse :-) but it's very early days yet. I'm hoping just to have to top up fresh fruit and veg now weekly.
Off to meal plan round yesterday's meat and fish offers now.

£300-£53.76=£246.74

t14cy_t

please may i set my budget again for £200 for february. this is for 2 adults, 3 large dogs, 2 ducks and 5 chicken (lost one yesterday). xx

gill5blue

H, Can I please have £216,50 for February.

grunnie

I am in again at £100. There is only the 2 of us and we spent £85.24 in January but some of this was cleaning stuff as I sent an order to Splosh and also bought toilet roll and soap in Home Bargains