February 2025 Grocery Challenge

Suffolk_lass

I ended January at £164.86. It is good for my annual budget but an £18.01 chicken that DH bought, busted the £150 I was aiming for. 

A few things I need to stock up on and big river subscription in February mean that this month will be more. Despite being a shorter month. Hoping for under £300 with big stock up

cheerfulness4

Begun the month with a small £5.08 spend at Asda this morning.

3 x wholemeal bread flour 1.5kg @ £1.05 each
2x tinned tomatoes @ 39p each
Jar lemon curd @ £1.15

We've been promising ourselves a lemon micro pudding and custard treat all January but I was cutting my budget back so it didn't happen. Will now!

AnimalTribe

£250 for Feb please

This is for 2 adults (food, cleaning stuff & personal care items), 2 dogs (food & treats). It excludes meals on days out as this is part of the holiday budget. My freezer and pantry are still full so I'm hoping to make most meals from what's already in store. I know I will need fruit, some salad, milk, bread, and dog food, but I'm going to see how far I can stretch the rest of the stuff.

JingsMyBucket

Thank you so much @elsiepac for running the grocery challenge. Glad you checked back in with us x

Even though it’s a 4 week month, I’m going to rollover the £30 bulk fund from last month. I underspent in January by £125.  Eating from the freezer and pantry really helped us along with reducing Tesco online orders. We stuck to doing singular top up shops at Lidl or M & S.  By doing this we limited our basic groceries to ≈ £25 – £40/week

That said, the freezer is now completely empty of meat and I’m going to restock at Lidl tomorrow. I’ve also put in a Tesco order that’s arriving today. This month I’m roughly aiming for:

£330 for February 1 — 28. 
£65/week x 4 weeks = £260. Add in £60 for bulk/restock.

We’re 2 adults who choose and need to eat less carbs / white foods due to health. Potatoes are an occasional treat. I’ve upped our weekly to £65 from £60 just because I know we’ll need to replace the meat in the freezer. 

How this is translating with our recent purchases… 

£85.16 for the Tesco order coming this afternoon. That’s covering chicken thighs, a whole chicken, lots of yoghurt, salad, cavolo nero, broccoli, frozen vegetables and fruit, bananas, onions, various rice packets, tomatoes, pasta sauce, orzo, linguine, chipolatas, sliced ham, canned beans, canned tomatoes, oatcakes, and other good stuff. I threw in a couple treats to keep us mentally going through this slog of a month. I bought a thick pork pie that I’ve been meaning to try for a while. There’s also a kulfi ice cream that’s on sale due to Ramadan that looked excellent. 

£34.88 spent at Amazon this morning on 2 1kg tubs of peanut butter and 2 boxes of snack bars. This should last us 6 weeks and will come out of the bulk fund. 

£120.04 / £330.00 spent. £209.96 remaining. 

£46.21 to last me through February 7th as I’m allocating £65/week. £25.12 of bulk funds left

We’re going to Lidl and M & S tomorrow and expect to spend about £55 between the two of them. The plan for Lidl is to stock up on meat, dishwasher tabs, and a few other items. At M & S it will be their olive oil that’s £9 vs our usual brand that now costs £16 at Tesco, along with fruit and canned sardines. The olive oil and dishwasher tabs will come out of the bulk fund since they should last a while. 

AnotherNewDay

Afternoon All, going to try and carry on eating down stores/freezer in Feb....but here is the first spend of Feb
 
Cats = £14.98 and me = £9.11 (deoderant, eggs, soya milk & marg)

RandomOne

Starting February off with a spend of £65.59.

I actually stuck to my shopping list today..i cannot even remember the last time i did that! I walked out of the supermarket feeling really pleased. 
I did buy the boys a frozen pizza and some snacks for tonight, as I'm going out for a meal with friends. So technically I could have saved some money by not buying that for them. 

I think my plan is to track my food spending in a notebook, as well as on here and my DF Diary, so i can look at it on the last day of Feb and see what mistakes i made and how i can improve for March. 

I did start getting caught up in thoughts of switching supermarkets, swapping brands etc. These are definitely things i plan on doing at some point, but for this month I'm just focusing on shopping every 4 days or so, instead of every day. 

£65.59 / £400 spent. £334.41 left

Soontobeoap

Trip to Aldi for flowers for friends and veg for Sunday roast. Not counting flowers I spent £10. I decided to buy 4 pieces of breaded fish and try the down grade brand idea. Also bought their chips which are cheaper than our normal brand. Not as nice but we forgot to get them on our trip to Sainsburys yesterday. Didn't make lasagnas and shepherds pies today as I was tackling condensation mould in our guest room. So will do those tomorrow. We have maineals for us now for the month. Just need to sort out the Family when they come to stay.

Optimistic_Saver

I’d love to join, for February, if that’s okay?

£100 for Feb please

Mrs_Cheshire

Couple of spends to start the month. Bulk toilet rolls to last 12 weeks. Some snacks and meat bought whilst on special offer. Tomorrow I've got a click and collect order from Morr!sons - had a 10% off voucher code so have ordered lots of stuff we'll use over the month. Going to sit down tomorrow afternoon and roughly meal plan for the month so hopefully we won't have to buy much fresh stuff other than fruit, veg, dairy etc

nannygladys

Hi my total for my no spend January was £29.82, which I have also posted on the January thread.
February I'm going for a low food spend for me and a normal spend month for the pooch. I think it will mainly be on fresh fruit, veggies and toiletries, any money saved will be going towards a new pair of glasses. 
Nannyg