September 2023 Grocery Challenge

Thevalueofless

September total £270.10/£295 

Happy to have come in under budget this month for groceries and store items. The allotment had certainly helped us. The underspend has gone into supporting spending another areas for September as we had a wedding expense and new glasses for me so a very spendy month. 

Over to October now, see you all there.

TVOL

JingsMyBucket

Adding in the last receipt from Saturday, the 30th. We were doing so well but then I got vertigo last week and couldn't cook. Plus, we needed to contribute to a movie night at Mr. Jings' cousins' house. £29.60 spent at M & S that day for easy food we could eat and desserts for the movie night. 

£378.90 / £350 spent. 

SausageDogSandwich

My total for the month was £365.11/350. I’m happy with this as my 5 year old asked for a cheese and wine night last week  so £23 was on that, of course her wine was fruit cocktail fizzy juice from Lidl  so haven’t done to bad.

JingsMyBucket

@SausageDogSandwich that's really cute. Did she sample any stinky cheeses or just stay with cheddar? 

Verulamium_Vixen

@goldfinches I agree they do very well out of me and make far more than they give back. 
However, all my spend is either at the Tesco Local at the end of my street or at the Tesco Metro opposite my office. 
The weekly/daily odds and sods. My big shop happens in Aldi with occasional forays into Costco.

@elsiepac I'm finishing September on £711 out of £700

VV 

PipneyJane

Good morning All.

Once again, I’m miles behind (40-odd posts) and late declaring. I’m not going to list the final spends here - there’s no point - but for (possibly) the first time ever, we’ve finished significantly over our regular budget.  (Nearly £60(!) over our usual £140, but this month we had quite a lot of cash rolled over from previous.)  

I’m declaring at £193.86/£178, an overspend of £15.86!

What went wrong?  I didn’t meal plan as well as I usually do, so I think we made several trips to the supermarket after work just to get something to throw together for dinner.  Beyond that, I’m not sure.  I know that, on a couple of occasions, I had to throw out the mushrooms* I’d planned to use, which were bought home less than a week earlier but were growing fur/mould.  (Yes, I was growing fungus on my fungus.). We worked out that L!dl have changed the packaging on their big boxes of mushrooms, and they now sweat a lot more.

- Pip



* We use a lot of mushrooms.  They get added to most of my dishes.  Something I started doing decades ago while on a diet because they are a low calorie filler, with reasonable fibre and protein.

PipneyJane

2Scratters said:

Morning Peeps,
another one here guilty of not posting better and keeping myself accountable. As always though still working on keeping a ahem "rough check" on the balance. DH keeps messing it up and not putting all spends down appropriately. We have not been far off the mark in keeping in check, when a mistake is found I just work of the cash we have available, which is usually less  There has been a trip to the shop DH did the other day which should have cost under £5. The change that came back was in coins that we save i.e  £2, 20p and 5p. So the total we recorded was £9.50.
 There is just the 2 of us and 2 dogs so we can make this work. I use money from my wages when I get paid on the 27th monthly and set it in an account waiting to be collected. I move the 250 but only withdraw 200 and that is only done when money has run out even if it runs into the next month, it has now become later and later in the month for taking the money out. It may happen this year I end up with a spare month. This "change" sits in the account to be used at some point as a bulk buy. It has taken me years of budgeting to get to this stage and only a 2 or 3 yrs ago read on here somewhere too about the Christmas wages that are paid early to just leave them there till the normal date then treat the same as you do the rest of the year. Why did it take me this long I applied this to the rest of the year and here I am. 
This week we have had 3 TGTG bags very successfully & full of good stuff. 

Balance left £83.05/£200

2 Scratters xx

That might have been my suggestion, @2Scratters.  It only occurred to me because, for 7 years, I worked for a wonderful company that didn’t do the Christmas payroll early.  (Payroll used to get paid extra to come in for a day between Christmas and New Year to generate it). Our founder, Bill, also wrote a 1% “Christmas Bonus” into all of our contracts, paid in November, because “Christmas is expensive”.  (He was a lovely man by all accounts. Died several years before I started working there, but would still go to the office in his late eighties, and walk around talking to staff.  He’d deliver the payslips and say “Thank you for working for me.”)

Thank you for sharing your method of budgeting.  Excluding the Grocery Challenge money and the Meat Fund, ours is to quarantine money into multiple separate savings accounts which can only be used for the designated purpose, one for each category (e.g. Christmas Food, Date Night, Running-Away Fund (holidays), Car Fund, Petrol Money).  Our joint account is for the main household bills, usually paid monthly but some paid annually (mortgage, electricity, gas, phone, insurance, etc).  Again, it’s quarantined, and not considered spending money.

- Pip