Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

Humdinger1

Fascinating explanation @foxgloves! I do a mixture of daily, weekly and monthly planning. I enjoy cooking too - find myself using many recipes from my student days. Pulses, soups that become stews. Good for humans and the planet. DH finds it funny that I sometimes like to discuss what's good for dinner tomorrow while we wash up from dinner tonight. About to do big store cupboard stock up. Thanks as always love Humdinger xx

Cheery_Daff

Thankyou, this is all really useful thinking around meal planning. I've never really done it, and only got into batch cooking in the last year or so - that does mean I think ahead a bit more, but rarely before food shopping! Mr C and I often eat seperately for various reasons, but I do like to have all my meals for dinner and tea cooked and in the freezer for working days. Haven't managed that recently though so going to give me thought to meal planning this week (for me!) and see where we get to.

Baileys_Babe

Due to various factors we have in the past planned for today or tomorrow, the week, the month or two months.

Due to a number of reasons we are currently mainly in a today only phase. We don't do top up shops, which helps keep the costs down, so all meals need to come from cupboards, fridge and freezer, we still have a pleasant variety of meals.and when shopping I replenish to our stores plus anything else we have decided on.

I prefer it when we have for 3 weeks or more at a time, I feel we end up with more variety.

When we do a big meal plan I ask everyone ( there are 4 of us) for suggestions, I don't guarantee these will be on the plan - I don't want to end up with 28 pasta meals in a month or lots of very expensive or elaborate meals.

From the suggestions I chose the meals for the days we need special requirements like being able to put it on the table quickly or can be made in advance etc, I also add any meals that need a lot of preparation time or cooking, most of the month is left blank with us choosing next weeks meals from the master list.

Suffolk_lass

I plan our meals, but in a way that Mr Sl can select from 2-3 options. This allows him an element of choice but works within what I have in mind. Currently we are on a mission to reduce the amount of meat in store (having just bought a chicken, she says) - I have at least 8 roasting joints (largely thanks to having half a lamb most years) and a carrier with portioned meat in to work our way through. I think it will be April before I need to buy meat again as we don't eat a lot (portion wise) and tonight will be the second non-meat/fish dish this week. All our ready meals (ie leftovers I have frozen) have been consumed (I think…), in the great freezer use-it-up conscious eating campaign. The second half of a GBBS (thanks @foxgloves) has been roasted this morning, ahead of a vegetable curry this evening

KajiKita

Thank you for the detailed post reply Foxgloves. The main things I am gleaning as reducing cost factors are:

• you shop in person so can pick up yellow stickered things, or take advantage of your butcher’s offers.
• You plan in cheaper meals when making your list
• It being a big list of needed meals so it pushes your creativity to look at ‘use it up’ options from existing stocks.

Sadly most of this doesn’t apply to us (we don’t have time to go shopping at the weekends, Mr KK is not keen on ‘cheap’ meals and I’m always conscious of protein and fibre levels - he won’t touch pulses) apart from the last option which I ought to explore more.

What I could also try is a month long list of meals just for me - we eat together but differently because he eats meat and fish and I don’t. If I included soup cooking for work lunches (which I seem to have established a regular habit for now) that might bring some synergies / cost efficiencies ….? 🤔

KK

foxgloves

Hello Sunday Savers,

Thanks for all.your comments about meal planning, which I've enjoyed reading & have found interesting. The key thing with it is having a system which works for our individual lifestyles/circumstances, isn't it, while challenging those things we could maybe do better.

Yes, @KajiKita, your precis of how our monthly meal plans are contributing to more grocery underspends than previously is correct. We rarely do our main shop at weekends. Last year, Mr F compressed his working hours to 4 longer days with every Wednesday off, so that is now our grocery shopping day. I don't have the car on his work days & wouldn't manage a weekly shop on the bus. We still shop around for some items but less than we used to. When we were debt-busting, we shopped at A*di, but always had to go to Waitbl00m or another supermarket to buy our full list, then sometimes a third for cat meat, then the local market for fresh f&v and butcher, which was quite time-consuming. We currently use Waitbl00m for our main list but as Weds is also a market day, we can go there first. I don't have any concerns about us not eating sufficient protein or fibre. Yes, I do include plenty of 'cheaper meals' on the monthly meal plan - these are often based on pulses, which we both like. We don't buy ready meals - the nearest would probably be quorn sausages or the occasional 8 links of butcher's sausages for making a couple of slow cooker hot-pot recipes we like (each of which do 2 days, yay!)

There are a few basic products we still like to get from A*di but we just bulk buy them 2 or 3 times a year which saves time.

We occasionally do an online grocery order when circumstances demand it, but both of us prefer shopping in store so as to choose for ourselves (& get better dates) & scope out reductions/yellow stickers, plus it's just more social/enjoyable than more screen time. However, we find the majority of yellow stickered items are usually stuff we don't eat, don't need or aren't really much of a bargain. I'm quite strict on those, as with all things, if we don't need them, they're not bargains.

It's interesting hearing how everyone else does their meal planning so thanks for sharing.

F x

foxgloves

And here we are with another Monday rolled around for our delight & delectation….

A very ordinary day here, as it's my day for setting us up for the week ahead. A few budget-helping things:

*Managed to get the 4 loads of laundry I was planning into 3 so a bit of water & electricity saved there.

*Did my usual Monday morning budget updates.

*Dealt with February's birthdays - wrote cards & wrapped an 18th birthday present for my nephew. Mr F donated a box so with some bits from my recycled wrappings crate, I didn't need to buy anything to facilitate posting.

*Cashed out my combined Dec/Jan PA survey earnings at £43 & did 5 further assorted surveys.

*Entered a competition.

*Finished decluttering the settle & made up a new power cut box as wanted something to keep all the extra emergency tealight holders together ready for a quick grab if/when required. Was able to shop a small crate from home for this so no outlay required.

*Emailed electrician to book the work we need done in the loft plus fitting 2 new outdoor lights. Hope this can be done quite soon.

*Put a shout out on our local village FB page for good local window cleaner recommendations as we want to book a thorough one-off clean of exterior windows, doors & conservatory to get rid of post re-roofing gunge.

*Opened a dispute with the trader of books to whom I sent a box recently. They claim that 4 items were missing & 1 was not in a fit state to sell. Nothing was missing as I ticked off each item as I packed it & weirdly, the item deemed not to have met their quality specifications, I would say was probably one of the best condition items in the box. I do generally like this company so am giving them the chance to investigate my complaint before I leave a review.

*Have resurrected the pair of cable socks I started knitting for myself while we were in Northumbria. I like to have a knitting project on the go & nice socks are always useful.

Right, that's the budgetty bits of my day. Time for a tidy-up now & to jot down a few things I need to do tomorrow.

Wishing everyone a decent start to the new week,

F x

PennysIntoPounds

If it was WoB, I have to argue with them every single time. They say something or several things are missing, I send them a photo of the pile taken just before putting in box and sealing, they miraculously find these items that I apparently didn't send them

foxgloves

It's only happened to me on 1 previous occasion, @PennysIntoPounds, but this time has really annoyed me. Nothing was omitted from the box & nothing was damaged. Am waiting for a response to.my 2nd email. It's only about £3 but I feel my integrity & ability to count have been questioned.

teapot2

I've had a falling out with the musical black and white egg stealing bird company. They offered a decent price for a nearly new hardback then claimed it was in poor condition which it absolutely wasn't. CS were quite rude and unhelpful when I contacted them, so I won't use them now. With the other couple of buyers I've used, I notice that if they start to inspect books over a weekend then they often claim a few are missing or substandard when they definitely are neither on leaving here. I now try and schedule pick ups so that should arrive at the start of a week. To be fair when I've queried the 'missing' items they have been helpful and paid up.