How often to shop?

Gatesygirl

Just wondering how often do you do your food shopping and whether online or not.

I was thinking about doing a big once a month shop in the for the basics, perhaps online and then a shop every week for the fresh food. My only concern about doing a big shop once a month is that i may miss out on some of the good offers.

Your views would be most welcome.

angelavdavis

I do a monthly shop at Lidls - £50 (tinned, veg, meat, muesli, cheese, flour, wine, beer, etc).
Every 6-8 weeks I do a further shop at Tesco £60 (bulk items and stuff not available at Lidl - very often online)
I do weekly pick up of fresh veg and milk £60 p/m

Works out round about £160 for shopping for two per month. I agree with your point about offers, but to be honest, I find I reduce my off the cuff spending by minimising my visits anyway! I usually use vouchers and/or 2for1 offers at Tesco and Lidl's works out at least £10 per month cheaper for the same shop than Tesco (used to be £20 but I think prices have increased at Lidl's as it has got more popular)

Ishtar

Shopping monthly can be a great way of staying within a budget - when OH and I first lived together we shopped monthly as money was tight and it worked out cheaper to buy in bulk. More pricey items, such as big boxes of detergent were easily hidden within the £125 monthly budget)...but you have to be strict with yourself when you're doing the weekly bits and pieces shop...

After a time we found that we were spending upwards of £50 a week on 'vegetables', making our monthly food expenditure much higher than we wanted. So I went back to doing the weekly shop, where I spend around £65 a week.

I do sometimes trawl down to the supermarket, but just recently I've been shopping online as I can't be bothered with it at the moment. If you are planning to shop online there are loads of useful Tesco codes on the discount codes and vouchers board.

D.

Penny-Pincher!!

Hi

Ours is generally a big shop (£50 after using vouchers & BOGOF-probably about £70 before) at Tesco every 2 weeks, then weekly (£5-£10) things like bread, veg, fruit, and these are normally mega reduced items etc locally at Sainsburys or local market using a voucher here and there if we can. About once every 8 weeks we go to Waitrose and I use up all vouchers I have and pay 50% by these and spend about £70...so in total about £35pw, some weeks are less and some slightly more.

My OH has become a very thrifty shopper and he grabs great deals from our local supermarkets late at night. Warburton bread reduced to 10p, chicken pieces, fish, beef, veg, fruit, milk, ham, cheese etc etc for 20-50p.

We also keep a well stocked freezer so some weeks we dont need much at all and can get away with under £10.

We buy 2 pints of milk from the milkman (Friday) which is £1.02 a week then all our other milk is bought at Makros when we see reduced to 10p a pint and we freeze in the little pint plastic bottles and get out 2 at a time...excellent value and easier to store. Butter we bought last week there was reduced to 50p a pack and is ideal to freeze-we grabbed 6 of them, would have grabbed more but they were the last 6.

We are also lucky that we have 2 freezers. 1 is huge outside in shed and the is average size and in the kitchen.

The meat/poultry/ham products are all good quality and I am very fussy about ham but need to eat becasue of my diet.

HTH

PP
xx

Bongedone

I shop most days as I can never predict what I want. Also gives you a chance to pick up the bargains. Don't have much storage space in my house. I do try and have the odd week off so that I can use up the leftovers and bargains in the freezer. Then its back to filling it up again.