Realistic Food Budget for a single person / couple?

piggy_bank

Hi all,

I hope this is in the right place! I'm trying to address my food budget, because for months I've been telling myself that I budget £100 a month for food, and then make no effort to stick to it, just picking up whatever I fancy from the supermarket every few days. Now that we've got a deadline in mind for buying a house, I need to be much stricter on my food budget.

I can very happily have weetabix and a banana for breakfast each weekday, and then a baked sweet potato, feta and salad or soup for lunch at work. These seem like fairly cheap meals, and a month's worth comes to £36.90.

My problem comes with dinner, and I just can't seem to stick to a budget at all, especially as I live in a shared flat with a tiny under counter fridge, and a box freezer, so meal planning and cooking in bulk isn't an option. I cook for my partner probably 3 days a week, but as we're both on a tight budget and saving for a house we end up splurging on nice food rather than going out, so we buy expensive things like prawns and lemongrass and olives. Each time we go to the supermarket we raid the reduced sections, but still end up spending about £20.

I feel like the answer here is just "be strict with yourself", but I'm really struggling!

Does anyone have any advice on staying on a budget when there's no space to buy or cook in bulk? Should I give up nice food, and just live off of pasta? :rotfl:

GreyQueen

Well, as a singleton with a tiny flat with an undercounter fridge and a box freezer and no room to bulk cook, all I can say is - snap!

You can bulk cook by making things like a big chili (250-300g of mince will go a long way, or all-veggie options for vegetarians). You can keep this in the fridge and dip into it for several consecutive nights, ringing the changes with the extras.

Day one; chili with rice. Day 2 chili with baked spuds, Day 3 chili in wraps with a side salad.

HM soups are cheap and can make odds & sods of veggies s-t-r-e-t-c-h into hearty meals. Add some lovely bread bought on YS for 10% of full retail and you'll hardly feel deprived.

First off, set a budget and say it runs from a Monday to a Sunday. It's important to do this rather than a monthly budget otherwise you'll fall afoul of the fact that there are not exactly 4 weeks in a calendar month otherwise they'd be 336 days in the year (4 x 7 days x 12 months = 336). Where, of course, there are 365 days in year. I've a background in debt/ money advice and even well-educated people consistantly get this wrong. If you 'lose' 29 days from your planning, your budget won't work very well.

Make yourself a pot (or envelope) for each Monday-Sunday week according to that month's calendar and put an equal portion of that month's budget into it. Tell yourself that you can't dip into the next week's budget. This will stop your overspending accelerating as you go through the month.

Allocate yourself a weekly treat budget. This is for edible but not particularly nutritious stuff. Say a choc bar or a tube of prungles or whatever. Keep the treat budget low and stick to it, this will keep your spending on track and your waistline under control.

My monthly food budget varies between lows of £30-£40 to highs of about £70-£80. The highs are explainable by bulk buys of things on serious discount, like my spaving on extra virgin olive oil where I got one litre bottles for the price of 500 ml bottles and bought ten of them. That lumped £29.99 onto that month's budget.

I've got 20 years of financial data and do this level of expenditure year in and year out. I'm hardly eating carp; salads with EVOO and organic apple cider vinegar, grass-fed butter, small amounts of meat (preferably on YS), nuts and seeds from the health food shop......

Some nice things for cheap; frozen berries from the supermarket, with plain youghurt spooned over and sprinked with flaked almonds. Lush, feels very naughty but isn't.

Omelettes. The thrifter's friend, a small amount of veggies chopped finely and some dried herbs and a fast, easy, healthy meal.

Oven-roasted veggies, brushed with olive oil; decadent.

High cocoa dark chocolate (cooking aisle).

There's lots of things you can do, I'm off to steam some veggies with soup for tea and to have YS cake for pudding, got a big cake on YS yesterday, nomnomnom...........

Oh, unless you're specifically hunting YS bargains, try to stay out of the shops. Each visit you avoid means one less opportunity to blow the budget. Say you scope the fridge and find yourself uninspired but manage to rustle up something tasty to postpone the shopping one more day, it'll save you quite a bit of money over the year.

HTH.