2018 £50 February Challenge

PipneyJane

As requested, here is a separate thread for the £50 February Challenge.

The challenge is to spend a total of just £50 for your food and grocery purchases throughout the entire month of February. The £50 excludes things like takeaways – say for Valentine’s Day - but includes items such as sanitary products, cleaning products and laundry detergent purchased during the month. Yes, It’s tight but the aim is to limit your spending to that amount, not to limit the value of the groceries that you consume (if you have a freezer full of fillet steak, you can eat it). Would you care to join me?

In my case, this £50 will be for all grocery purchases for two adults for the month. If you have a larger family, one online friend suggested adding £25 extra for her two small children or £25 each per additional adult. If it’s bought from a supermarket, Costco, butcher, farm shop or market stall, then it will be included. We eat 3 meals a day plus snacks and the majority are home made. (We both take our lunch to work.) We have a friend staying this weekend and any spend for that will be included.

There are a couple of reasons why it’s “£50 February” but nothing to stop you doing this in, say, June. The first is the alliteration: I like the sound of it. The second is that, in 1991, I had a really tough February, where I found myself with only £25 plus my train fare for the month. I had two adults to feed, with a handful of items in the freezer and some rice, flour and pasta in the pantry. I remember going to Mr T’s with a carefully collated shopping list: 1lb cheddar, butter, 6 or 8 tinned tomatoes, rice, bran cereal, a couple of tins of tuna and pilchards, squash, a bag of minced beef... I found a local greengrocer, who was quite cheap, and lugged home 5lb of onions and 10lb of potatoes for £2.50. Londis own-brand coffee was horrible but it was 59p or 79p so I bought that to drink. I had no choice; Dumbo, (my now long-time ex), had wiped out my salary even before the month had started. I was lucky that work provided me with lunch every day, so I only had to do breakfasts and dinner.

This is the third year that I’ve done a £50 February Challenge. Each year, I try - and fail - to explain to my DH why I want to do it. It’s not as if we need to do it, but I’m trying to prove to myself that I can keep us both sane, well fed and comfortable on very little. So many people are literally one pay cheque from destitution and, in the years I lived with Dumbo, that would have been me. I lived with the consequences for years afterwards - it took a long time to recover. I guess I just want to prove to myself that I can do it if I had to. DH is a reluctant participant but he plays along.

I have two exclusions to my challenge:-

• We only use recycled toilet paper, so if L!dl suddenly stock Nouvelle or their own-brand 4-ply, then I will stock up. I will charge one packet to the challenge and the rest to the Bulk Fund (which grows at £40/month). Reason: the main supermarkets no longer stock Nouvelle and the L!dl 4-ply is lovely and soft if you can find it. (Nouvelle is softer than most supermarket’s.)
• We also have one known spend that I’ll be excluding from the challenge: we have a family party in Scotland at the end of the month, so I’ll be ordering haggis - 2 left feet and 2 right - from the butcher up there, together with some steak bridies and black pudding.

Some helpful hints and tips. I may add to this list later on:-

• Try to shop for the month in one go. It helps to make the money go further.
• Use – and abuse – your freezer. As well as buying frozen veggies or meat, a lot of things sold fresh can be frozen until you’re ready to eat it/cook with it (cheese, bread, cake).
• To make life easier for cooking from scratch, consider batch cooking and freezing the starters to recipes. Almost all my recipes start “fry onion with garlic, add mushrooms” so I will multiply up the ingredients and cook 4 recipes-worth together, before freezing 3 batches and finishing cooking dinner with the fourth. It takes less than 5 minutes to prepare four recipes’-worth of onions.
• Long Life Skimmed Milk tastes the same as fresh and costs 49p/litre. (Other long life milk has a funny taste from the cream.)
• If you buy fresh milk, consider freezing half. In my fridge, it takes 2 days to defrost completely. (Allow for an inch an expansion in your container.)
• L!dl sells the cheapest own-brand tampons that I’ve found. (79p a packet.) Note: in L!dl-speak, “super” is regular sized; “super plus” would be super anywhere else.
• Toiletries: until it disappeared from the shelves, Mr T’s “value” and Sainsbob’s “basics” baby shampoo was the cheapest shampoo available at 25p. (It’s a badly kept secret that Mr T and Sainsbob's use exactly the same supplier for their own brand toiletries. Ditto squash and many other products.) Next cheapest toiletries that I’ve found are L!dl’s Cien range.
• Except for YS markdowns, Lidl sell the cheapest mature cheddar cheese I’ve found.
• The cheapest rice I’ve found was 45p for a 1kg in Mr T’s. That was this weekend.
• Don’t buy juice; buy Value squash, which is highly concentrated, and drink flavoured water.
• Eggs. With the bird-flu alerts last summer, all the free-range hens in the UK were confined to barns. Now is the time to swallow your scruples and buy the basics 18 eggs for £1.25 tray from Sainsbob’s.
• Ignore use by and best before dates. If it doesn’t smell funny and isn’t mouldy, you should be able to eat it. (My baking powder is nearly 10 years past its best before date; it still works fine.)
• There are hundreds of links to cheap recipes at the start of each month’s Grocery Challenge. (February’s can be found here https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5778103)

ma-ri-ella

wishing you all the best!! I'm a month in to my own similar challenge. Thanks for the tips - ive just bought 1xskimmed,1xsemi skinned and 1 x full fat long life milk to do the taste test for challenge. My next thoughts was on could i freeze normal milk - as it is often reduced .

Shopping little and often is what i am currently trying so i can take advantage of checking out reduced section daily. I'm not doing bad in the food area but around half my total for year is actually other things like clothes,tolitries etc.

Use loyalty schemes and don't be loyal to anyone if that makes sense. Buy things where they are cheapest or is some shops are the same choose the one with the more card,nectar card ,clubcard etc - these schemes don't cotst,

PennyGrabber

Well done for doing this! I will follow and glean tips, sharing any I have.

First tip is: I always have a UHT milk in the pantry to stop my 'pop to the shop' trips.
Tip 2: don't take the ch shopping, or if you do, say you have x amount and get them to use their phone calculator!

I have soooo much food in the house that I should be good for February other than fresh stuff. My buzzword for this year is mindful - I'm being mindful of all my spends.

Good luck!

PG x

XSpender

I will be reading with interest as I am planning and prepping this month for a similar, but not as low as £50, challenge for next month.

lynnejk

Hiya

I've subscribed and will be following with interest

Good luck with the challenge
Lx

mummyjane

Good luck, I will be following too, I need all the tips I can get at the moment :rotfl:

JingsMyBucket

I’m pulling up a chair and reading with interest.

silver-oldie

ma-ri-ella wrote: »

. My next thoughts was on could i freeze normal milk - as it is often reduced .
,

I freeze 'normal' whole or semi milk. I usually put it into smaller containers as it has a shorter life. Don't fill to the top, leave a space for it to expand when frozen.

PipneyJane

Thanks everyone for your support.

ma-ri-ella wrote: »

wishing you all the best!! I'm a month in to my own similar challenge. Thanks for the tips - ive just bought 1xskimmed,1xsemi skinned and 1 x full fat long life milk to do the taste test for challenge. My next thoughts was on could i freeze normal milk - as it is often reduced .

We freeze milk all the time, this morning I froze half the 2L bottle DH bought yesterday. You have to time the defrosting, though. 1 litre plastic milk bottle takes about 2 days to completely defrost in our fridge.

silver-oldie wrote: »

I freeze 'normal' whole or semi milk. I usually put it into smaller containers as it has a shorter life. Don't fill to the top, leave a space for it to expand when frozen.

Do you find the cream in homogenised whole/semi-skimmed milk separates out after defrosting it? It seems to do so, for me.

To give you an idea of what we're eating, breakfast most days will be what we had today. DH will have microwaved himself some porridge, while I had my standard mix of half cheapest-bran-cereal, half "strawberry crunch", with a tablespoon of sunflower seeds stirred in. (I have a fake-Tupperware container for cereal, so mix the two cereals together in it, in bulk, about once a month. Circa 35g in a bowl plus the seeds - for added protein - does me until lunchtime.)

We were out at the football last night, so our lunches today were random lunchboxes taken from the freezer. NB: since most recipes are designed to feed at least four people, I always dish up our lunch boxes while I'm plating up dinner. This ensures there is actually enough set aside for both of us to have a lunch, because He Of The Hollow Legs will inevitably go back for seconds. My lunch turned out to be Macaroni Chicken from my ancient copy of "How to Feed Your Family on £4 a Day"*. It was obviously made with either leftover chicken or turkey scavenged from the carcase of a roasted bird. (I found bones.)

Tonight, we've got tickets to Cirque de Soleil, so dinner will be exactly the same as we had last night: wraps made with a smear of humus, YS sliced meat and mixed salad from the largest, cheapest bag DH could find yesterday. (I'm not counting that spend in the Challenge since it wasn't in February.)

Dinner should be accompanied by the not-quite-properly-cooked apple cake DH baked on Tuesday. It was his first attempt and, since he was making a double quantity, he used our larger oven which is less reliable on the temperature front. Both cakes could have done with at least another 10 minutes, but they'll get eaten eventually. (We froze one.)


- Pip






* For some reason, I can't post a hyperlink today. Here's a link to a more recent edition of the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Feed-Your-Family-Day/dp/0007485654/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517490974&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=feed+your+family+on+%C2%A35+day

Viking_mfw

Great challenge! Good luck and thanks for the tips

X_Duvessa_X

I did £57 last month increased my budget to £60 might try to be a bit stricter with myself