November 2021 Grocery Challenge

Elisheba

Hi @elsiepac Could you please add me to this month's challenge?  £70 for one vegetarian adult not including cleaning products until 30th.

I'm sorry, I can't see Header style 2 as an option, and don't know the coding for it.

cornishchick

met my daughter for a charity shop rummage. nothing for me,
then as the Food warehouse was nearby dropped in and brought a few bits as a few pence cheaper than my normal Asda shop.£11.50 bringing my total so far too.

£23.54/£100

thriftwizard

Eeeek! A mahoosive £193.83 spent today - well, it was more, actually, but I'm not counting the £30-odd spent on festive supplies at L!dls (missed out on a lot of these last year, went down there too late; festive stuff comes out of my Christmas savings account) but I've done a massive store-cupboard re-stock, having tossed a lot of stuff out after an attack of pantry moths. So that includes an entire sack of oats (not that they were attacked, they live in a dead freezer in the garage & we just ran out) and a number of other grains, nuts & seeds. Belts will need to be kept quite tight for the rest of the month...

suzybloo

Good afternoon folks - a wee bit colder here today!
First spend of the month - a quick trip to the Co-op just round the corner - really didnt fancy going to Tesc0, for milk, bread and something for our dinner - forgot to take something out to defrost earlier, so an extra £4 compared to what I had anticipated. 
First shop of the month coming in at £8.65/£375

Smoosh

OH spent £3.27 on a few bits yesterday.

Big shop today - £34.60 on 4 pints of milk, 2 litres of juice, shampoo, chips, peas, halloumi burgers, hash browns, deodorant, 8 wraps, mozzarella, dairylea dunker style snacks, pancetta, 400g Cheddar, 1 kitchen roll, 3 leeks, beansprouts, 450g yoghurt, ready meal, 4 bananas, pad Thai meal kit, stock cubes, chicken slices, ham, 500g pasta, Thai crackers, 4 rolls, 12 eggs.

Need to cut down to keep on track - the rest of the month is going to be hard.

£81.19/£200.

diminua

£19.90 so far on bread, milk, tinned fish, smoked salmon, eggs, ginger ale, potatoes, tomatoes, pesto, sundried tomato paste, penne - I had extra nectar points on the jars and tinned fish so have a £5 voucher for next time.
£5.45 on yesterday's pain au choc and a mozzarella baguette for lunch. I resisted the fancy coffees and teas though, so that's something. 

chirpycheap

Last month I kept track of my monthly spends as suggested in the intro to this thread before I joined in this month's challenge. It really showed me where exactly the money was disappearing to. If you'd asked me to guesstimate what we were spending I would have said around £300 a month. In the end it turned out to be £400! No wonder it seemed like the money was disappearing down th plug hole!

I also tracked by categorising my spending and discovered that my spending on sweet treats was pretty eye watering. We're vegan so any treats do tend to cost more so this is the area that I am going to tackle first by either making my own, finding cheaper alternatives or doing without.
I've set our budget at £300 so need to spend £100 less this month. It feels a bit daunting but it will be interesting to see whether I can reduce our monthly food spend. 

Suffolk_lass

Well done @chirpycheap, it really is illuminating to track for a month, isn't it? I still do it once in a while. It's a great way of exposing your weak spots so you can develop techniques to mitigate or avoid them.

My Direct debits always took me by surprise so I ended up recording in a spreadsheet, when and how much, with a separate sheet for annual payments and the aggregated totals of the monthly things (which caused me to cancel one or two).

In grocery shopping terms, I spend approximately £345 on milk deliveries (not allowing for holiday reductions) and about £210 on eggs, both of which are delivered (annual cost). I reckon I save more by avoiding the shops and the temptations that are my downfall. Quite shocking that this is 18% of my annual £3000 budget! 

try_harder

Thank you so much Suffolk lass for taking so much time out to explain that to me ..I read it over last night with my husband and i have decided to put a set amount possibly £400-£500 aside on the first of January then subtract that from my food budget each week ready for the following year ,that way i will always have forty odd pounds in my stocking up budget at least per month ..Very happy with that plan thank you

pamsdish

First spends of November, £27.84 in M0rr1es, £4.77 in L1d1, £5.47 IN 8&M. Still not caught up with Aug until now, will have to work it out, but happy within budget.