Food bill to rise by £750 per year

purpleivy

I was expecting costs to rise when dd leaves home......eeek!

affordmylife

purpleivy - how does that work then.

two have mine have left - my cupboards and fridge are overflowing as they used to eat me out of house and home!!!

definitely cut out costs here. how could it go up?

purpleivy

She'll be first of all on gap year... the first bit of that she is going to Sweden to live with friends, will be living with them, going to school, volunteering help with English/music and attending Swedish classes. She could go by air, but that would mean she couldn't take her cello with her. DH suggested that I take her (whooppeeeeee! I love visiting these friends! Have known them a long time. Their 2 dd's each stayed a month with us when they were 16, to improve their English). Will need to pay them some housekeeping.

She is planning to work for part of the year and use some money that GPs have put away for her. Is also working at the International GUide Centre in Mexico if she gets her place there. That will be pocket money only. I expect she can fund the flight herself.

Then it's Uni, so will be red cross food parcels etc etc, driving there and back to collect her for hols, etc etc etc. We won't pay it all, but I expect there will be input from us. She's not an extravagant girl at all, but does like to go the odd gig or two! Doing Modern languages, so there is likely to be time spent abroad...hopefully earning, but it may be study. Just don't know what the situation is going to be.

patchwork_cat

I think so Viva. I think it is the % increase as I could easily see that if the average family spent £110 on food per week it would be increasing by £15. It all depends what their average family spends.

Purpleivy when I read your post I wondered why her Dr was funding her gap year at first ! and thought I wonder if mine'll do that for my son and then thought no they won't even prescribe my daughter her eczema cream because it is too expensive. ( I know really what GP meant, but it took a second!)

Ebenezer_Scrooge_2

Food prices have gone up alot, partly as a direct result of fuel costs.

Chinas people have had mass growth, requiring lots of the worlds fuel and materials, and they are also buying lots of dairy and meat products now, this is also having an affect on global food prices and pushing them high.

So we are now paying for all those years of cheap electronics from china!

This is set to carry on, I think we are in for a rocky 2008, so save where you can folks

Economics lesson over

purpleivy

Well, the grandparents won't exactly be funding her gap year. She got a bit of ££ from her grandmother, money her gran didn't want (because of where this money had come from, inheritance, long story!)

taplady

I agree it is extremely worrying and if like us you are on a very strict budget then there must as Hardup hester says come a point when you cant cut back any more:eek: .We will be having a drop in income soon of £170 a month:eek: and as it is DH is off sick on SSP ATM so I just dont know what we will do. I am cooking from scratch wherever possible and trying out some recipes with lentils which are cheap and filling. HM soups and casseroles etc and also cutting portion sizes. i am going back to making my own bread again(slipped for a few months) as bread is so exensive now and I am saving for a new BM(a panny) as mine is old and was bought off a carboot. We also grow some of our own veggies so might have to extend the veggie garden too. Luckily I get quite a few meals at work. Will be watching with interest!

larmy16

Some of the items I buy regularly have gone up by as much as 30pence. Incidentally could this explain the lack of Earl Grey Tea Bags in Morrisons??? At 76-78p a box of 50, they are way cheaper than other brands. Hmmmph, no Morrisons that does not mean you should increase the price.

Maybe have to go back to squeezing two cups out of one bag. I always mean to do this but forget and before I know it, bag is on compost pile.

iamstacie

I'm glad I discovered MSE when I did, especially the DFW & OS boards. I earn a decent wage and don't have massive outgoings so I'm very lucky in that respect, but I am constantly worried that the company I work for will ship my job out to India which unfortunately in my industry is a very real prospect. I have no problems taking a job in McDonalds or a supermarket (I'd love to go back to working for B&Q actually, I love DIY) but its would mean a drop of around 10k + a year.

Already I'm cutting back where I can, saving hard (potentially for a big mortgage deposit providing my job stays in this country!) and just generally being more aware of what I'm spending. We have the GCH on twice a day for about 6 hours in total, I think this can come down though since we're generally wrapped up in sleeping bags anyway, I've been making more stuff from scratch, bulk cooking & freezing in batches, bulking out meat with lentils & TVP, and stretching out leftovers more than I ever thought possible.

Basically, we can absorb the cost for now but it wouldn't take much to change that.

Bargain_Rzl

I've been looking at this from a slightly different perspective.

Obviously like everybody else I've noticed the massive % price increases on staple items: butter, milk, bread, pasta, flour.

But in the last few years - it may just be my perception, but it has seemed that some items haven't been keeping up with the rate of inflation at all, with prices remaining static and in some cases falling. Now, it's as if there's been a "correction" in a similar manner to the one a lot of people are expecting in the property market. I realise that that's not the REASON for the sudden increases, but it is certainly an analogy that works from the consumer perspective.

I mean, I started at university in 1996, and I had a budget of £15 a week for food. Up till very very recently, I still had a budget of £15 a week for food, because things simply hadn't been going up in price. Now for me as a single person, my food expenditure has risen to more like £20 a week - but it's the first time this has happened in 11.5 years (except for a blip about 7 years ago when I was shopping quite wastefully).

Where I work I am lucky enough to get an annual payrise linked to cost of living, and when this comes in, I apportion it out according to which costs have actually gone up. Council tax always does; utilities usually do; TV licence always goes up a bit. But this year when my COL increase comes in (in July) it is the first time in my ENTIRE ADULT LIFE that I will need to budget extra for groceries.

I realise that these observations don't make things any easier for people who are already on a shoestring and are seeing a sudden rise in their essential costs. But my point is that (unless my perceptions are completely off) food costs have been static for a very long time and the fact that they'd go up at some point was only to be expected.