January 2017 Grocery Challenge. NEW BEGINNINGS!

lynnejk

Evening folks

Hope you all keeping warm and dry

I will not be shopping t/m so I'm declaring at £188.84/200 for January :j so that's £11.16 to go into Bulk budget at end of month, as I'm still here until 31st.

Hope you all have a super Tuesday
Lx

mrs-moneypenny

Spent £96.37 over weekend so need to update sig for final time this month.


I'm going to declare January at £231.12 and move into Feb as today will be an NSD

Low spend was achieved by the fact we swapped the freezer over so basically lived and ate from that for most of the month.

WantToBeSE

Morning All

i really feel like something has clicked recently, and all of a sudden i am managing to tick to my GC budget

I've done all the food shopping for this week (my final week for January, it goes from Fri-Thur) and have £29 still leftover! I am amazed.

So, for Feb i have done a massive online shop from Sainsburys of £100. This is stock up the pantry. Then i am only going to withdraw £60 a week for food instead of £100. This means i hope to spend £60 less in February.

I feel it's totally do-able

JingsMyBucket

freyasmum wrote: »

It does focus the mind somewhat - last night, we had a pizza and film night. We made three big pizzas and a tonne of wedges (easily three dominos portions) and OH made a comment that it would have been easier to just phone a dominos (guess who had to roll the dough, cos my nails would have poked through :A). When we sat down, I worked out that it had cost us less than £3 for the entire spread - the same amount would have cost almost £50 if we'd ordered in :eek::eek::eek:

I love reading this! Every once in while I also do the math on a soup, pizza or whatever dish and realize it cost me 50 cents to make versus 8 euros to buy. Last year we started using Lebanese flat breads/pitas to make our own pizzas at home. They are very thin and function like a thin crust pizza. We buy them for 5 in a packet for 90 cents. Between that and toppings, it was only costing us about €1 per personal pizza each versus buying €11 per person. BTW, Lebanese bread / pain libanais looks like this picture: astucesagogo.com/photos-images/pain-libanais-003.jpg.

It really makes you see how much money you're wasting or spending on prepared foods. Foods that aren't even fully spiced to your liking either.

freyasmum

Jings (brilliant name, BTW!), it is crazy, isn't it?!

I use the Jim Lahey no knead pizza dough and I'm sure I worked it out to cost about 36p for 6 bases! You need to prep it the night before but it's the easiest pizza dough I've ever made! And OH said the pizzas were fantastic- the bases were absolutely spot on.

The only thing is; last night, Oh decided that we should have pizza again to use the dough - but we needed more mushrooms, peppers, and cheese! I asked him to pick up a pork fillet and some onions when he was going in anyway.

Today I've made a panful of paprika pork, and a portion of pork curry for my dinner tonight (cannot wait to tuck in!).

However, this took our spending up to £292.90. Still under budget, but not as impressive as it had been!

Also meant to say that my daughter, over the course of four weeks, has 20% of her budget left - and she certainly hasn't been scrimping! :T

See you all in February now!

greent

I'm declaring Jan at 394.91 against the £400 target - pleased with that as it includes treats when DD unexpectedly came home for the weekend with her bf and also OH's food spends whilst working away (those not covered by expenses)

summerlady_2

Hi
I've completely lost track of this thread but I have checked my spending for January and it comes in at £158.74 against a target of £200. I have dropped my target for next month and hope to come in well under.


I now need to tackle my other spending - I totted up and with course fees I spent over £400 on my hobbies in January. I should be able to bring it down to £50-£60 a month if I am careful. I am actually feeling pleased that I don't have a holiday booked!!

Caterina

Just updated my sig with the £8 spent the other day. Technically today I am going to break the budget because I need to pick up only a couple of things for today but the bulk of the shopping is for next month. So I am going to start my February today! Goodbye, January thread, I did not do too bad but next month is going to be more expensive.

FurryBeastOz

NSD today. Yay. Declaring £23.21 under budget. And that is having reduced my budget £50 a month from last year.:j

Rolling the saving up to my Bulk Buy fund which now stands at £104.69.

I'm off to budget February.:D

Lauralozzle

My new month starts today as its pay day

Declaring an overspend of £52.33 for the month. I really make that back in Feb!