November 2020 Grocery Challenge

[Deleted User]

Currently at £153.17/ £3600 annual - around £45 of that has been for household goods though, from next month these will be from a separate budget! 😉

[Deleted User]

I really really need to sort my spending out at my local Tesco. I seem to find myself buying crap all the time and spending a fortune !!

quintwins

We had a pizza last night. I've rolled my eating out into my food budget because if I eat out I'll send less on food anyway. My total currently stands at £279.09 so I have £170 left and I change to December next Friday so I'm pretty positive I'll come under  

PipneyJane

Evening All

I would have sworn I’d written a post on Monday, but it appears to have vanished into the ether.  Anyway....Sunday, we walked down to L!dl and spent £18.34 on groceries, which included 2 YS packets of fish cakes for £1.12 each.  (I have to admit that I’m a big fan of L!dl’s fishcakes - they have sizeable chunks of fish in them.). We also bought a Salmon En Croute (£3.99) for the freezer.  This was the first time in months that they were selling a version without prawns in the sauce.  (I love Salmon En Croute but I’m allergic to prawns.)

Yesterday, we drove to MrT’s and bought the things we couldn’t buy in L!dl:  Yeo Valley Yoghurts (at £1 for 450ml), long-dated 2L skimmed milk (£1.09), ground mixed spice (85p), 500ml tub of creme fraiche (£1.79, 11p cheaper than L!dl), etc.   I also spent £1.18 on cherry tomatoes to oven dry.    £18.53 spent from the Grocery Challenge.

MrT’s were selling Options Hot Chocolate for £2 “Clubcard Price”, so the Bulk Fund bought 5 flavoured ones.  (I mix 1 teaspoon flavoured hot chocolate with 2 teaspoons cheapest plain hot chocolate, to make a hot chocolate drink.) 


There’s £3 left in the Grocery Challenge purse, so somewhere along the line, we must have scored a £2 coin and a load of coppers/5p pieces.  (£2 coins get contributed to the Running Away Fund, while  5p, 2p and 1p pieces go into a separate coin jar.). £2.74 to “schrapnel”.

The above brings our total spend for November to £137/£140, leaving £3 for the remainder of the month.  It should be do-able, but I foresee a shopping trip on 30th November, spending December’s GC money - we’ve got another “double points” voucher for MrT’s, that’ll run out at the end of the month and DH won’t want that to go to waste.

- Pip

PipneyJane

Densol said:

I really really need to sort my spending out at my local Tesco. I seem to find myself buying crap all the time and spending a fortune !!

Do you take a shopping list?   Have you worked out what you want to cook  - and what’s ingredients are already the cupboards - before you go shopping?  Both would help.

- Pip

thriftwizard

Bust again, or I will be, long before 30th... I've spent about £55 today - will update later on retrieving receipts from the depths of my van, which is also full of horrible stuff on its way to the Tip - £35 on nuts alone! I didn't think we'd need any more until after Christmas, but I've discovered that OH, who's working from home, has been scoffing handfuls of almonds & hazelnuts every time he would have had a few biscuits & a cuppa at the office (he does pay into the tea fund) as we don't tend to keep biscuits in the house. And we won't mention the coffee bill! Not to mention having the heating on when the girls & I would normally just chuck an extra jumper on, but we're not attending Zoom meetings... Anyway, even if I'm extra frugal for the next two weekends, I'll definitely be spending more than £4.95. I can't be cross with him, he earns the bulk of the money. But I may have to buy him some of his favourite Jaffa cakes...

In case you're wondering why we need so much, nuts are one of our pescatarian daughters' main sources of protein. They do also eat lentils, chickpeas, mushrooms and the occasional helping of fish, but nuts are a staple. They don't eat a lot of high-tech veggie stuff, and when they do DD1 buys it from the supermarket she works at so it doesn't cost us anything, so I don't begrudge the nuts in their weekly nut-roast & odd bit of baking (chocolate babka last night) because it still works out cheaper than meat. Not when they're being scoffed by the handful though!

goldfinches

Spent £18.98 at Sains*ury's on frozen fruit, washing pods for the machine, loo cleaner, kitchen cleaner spray and sour cream, single cream, dried sage and brown onions as well as some reduced cherry tomatoes. Then spent £6.27 at T*sco on reduced mango and strawberries as well as radishes for snacking. So now have £43.46 to last me until the end of this month which is looking just about do-able. 

pamsdish

£29.69 In Morries, tonic water, 2 pork shoulder joints which I will portion and vac pack tomorrow, likewise a pack of liver, got 4 packs of y.s. heck sausages, few other bits and bobs, popping to big tesco later as fuel cheaper there and tank halfway, will kill time in the shop as waiting for phone call to collect my dog from the vets, expecting £500 plus for tooth extraction, I could get implant for that.!!

goldfinches

Passed through Marks Food Hall on the way home from the library and spent £1.79 on y/s rocket and little gem hearts.

I was amused to be accosted by a member of staff at the door who was drawing everyone's attention to the boxes of all butter mince pies going for £1 today when I've seen them do very badly in various taste tests over the last fortnight or so.
I expect they'll come down even further in price soon so if anyone fancies freezing a few boxes for emergencies watch this space. 

Night all, goldfinches.
ETA: £41.67 left in my kitty now.

pamsdish

£3.55 In tesco, 2 packs of y.s. black pudding sausages, interesting, and a y.s smoked salmon, which I was very tempted to scoff, out the packet, in the car while waiting for my dog, after her dental surgery, a whopping £667.40 !!!!, put the bottle of gin I bought in Tesco, to good use last night, a good offer in Tesco clubcard price £20 for a litre of Bombay Sapphire.
Will be glad to see the back of 2020, obviously been awful for the entire world.