November 2016 Grocery Challenge

hanb

First ever spend update here.. exciting!!

Spent £31.34 at Lidl today. Which included a bottle of gin and some steaks on offer. Hoping all I'll need to buy in the week is milk and more broccoli!

Hopefully this thread will keep me on track!

£31.34/£140

blubella

£9.01 spent at Morimans yesterday, on: a bottle of wine, some greens, pears, dark choc..went home and made a mushroom pasta sauce. Obviously not from those ingredients..:D

Going to try and get back to cooking..use up the fridge contents and reduce the spending this month...

£31.81/£175

pinkypig

I've had a bit of hiccup which is a bit of a worry in week one!
I stupidly forgot to put toilet roll and coconut milk on my list so I had to go back to Aldi.
Before left my lovely BIL offered to do some odd jobs (that have needed doing for a while) for me tomorrow. By way of a thank you I asked him and my sister to stay for tea and then felt a bit guilty and asked mum and dad too because I've not seen them much this week.
There is no way my planned meal would stretch to another 4 people so I got curry ingredients as well which came to £13.20 in total :eek:

I'm going to batch cook the curries (chicken and also a veggie one) so I should get two meals for the freezer as well as tonight's meal.

I'm going to have to make sure I don't have anymore spends this week and a very small shop next week though

Laura_Elsewhere

I'm new to this (still figuring out the shorthand - sts??) but would like to spend £100 less in November.

I've got all my receipts from October so can work out eventually what we spent - we use a mixture of switch-card payment and gift-cards for some supermarkets as we top those up at a 5% discount, so we save money by using those. Also, I'm getting cannier at catching their reduced-price meat in particular.

I just need to keep my eye on it all much better than I have been!

Manxcottageonthehill

Hello, please can you put me down for £300 please. We really need to sort out our spending and start getting a nest egg up and running. Hoping to spend way less than that but you have to start somewhere right

Thanks

Florence_J

Hi everyone, my month has already started and have done some shopping.

Bulk Buys from last months shopping added to this month: £10.46
Sainsbury's: £2.45
Tesco: £1.90
Iceland: £1
Home Bargains: £9.55

And have just done my big monthly food shop at Tesco for £51.95

Total so far: £77.31

Total left from £112: £34.69

So once again I am repeating the habit of spending a worrying amount at the start of the month and somehow (hopefully!) making it to the end of the month with pennies to spare.

Slowly57

£10 spend on fresh stuff for next week (bread etc) from MrT

[Deleted User]

Florence J - Have you thought of dividing your money between the weeks - works for me (mostly). If you meal plan for the first week, you might only need to spend an xtra £10, to make up the meals, then the balance can be carried over. I do go over myself, really not an expert, but does work for me when I can stick to it.

PennyGrabber

Hi all,

I'm in for £100 for November. I'm hoping to be much lower than this though... I lost count in Oct, but I did manage to have two great ys sessions, one at a$da and one in morries. Yesterday's in m was great - a kilo of pork loins for £2.50, a whole cooked chicken, pork mince, 4 packs of sausages at 20p each and loads of other bits. Freezer, small as it is, is full of meat and veg, so I will be using a lot of this during Nov to keep me on the right side of my budget. I will need to look at each thing I put in my trolley, and ask myself if we really need it this month. I am in the middle of planning nov's meals, and am feeling confident!

PG x

Kahra

Hi everyone! The grocery budget is the hardest budget line for me to tackle - while I know it's totally within my control, I watch all the spends add up through the month and feel powerless to stop it. I did pretty well a few months back with meal planning, and we ate better than ever, but it's not intuitive for me yet. So I'm going to give it another go this month with a goal of £290. Wish me luck!