April 2008 Grocery Challenge

toniwoty2009

Well I failed misreably this month

I lost count after £300 :eek: :eek:

mrsm please put me down for £250 for May. I'm gonna keep at the £250 target til I manage it :rolleyes: we have loads to pay out for this month so i will be attempting to clear the freezer entirely.

Angelraesunshine

WorkingHardDFW wrote: »

Hi I joined this challenge at the start of the month and have failed .....:o

My budget is £300 for a family of five (2 adults and 3 kids with good appetites).

I thought I was doing OK. Buying sensibly, shopping not just at Tesco but also at Lidl and Aldi for fruit and veg and bargains. Although I have two kids birthdays this month (so extra spending on homemade birthday cakes, sweets etc etc) I've managed to spend a whopping £362 :eek: .

Short of listing out everything I buy I not sure where I go from here. We eat well using fresh ingreidents, cooking from scratch (One child has a wheat/gluten intolerance) and I have started using lentils, beans etc to bulk out mince type meals - still I have overspent.

I don't think my budget is too tight from looking at what other spend per month so it must be something that I am doing wrong...

Thinking about it over the weekend I thing that I need to do the following a little more:

• Start being systematic with buying ie buy my fresh veg/fruit for the week on a monday to last through
• Plan my meals a little more - I shop online and I am good at stocking up the freezers with staple ingredients but we've fallen a little short this month so perhaps I need to revisit the quantaties.

Hopefully these actions will help but any suggestions appreciated:rolleyes:

I will try again for May although we've got a family party at the end of the month so that will either have to be a seperate budget or I will go over again.

if this is your 1st month to try then i think you have not done badly.

I am a family of 5 aswell and have nearly been doing this challenge year now( see my signature). you get good months and bad months and you have to add a little extra if you need to buy specialty foods for wheat/ gluten intolerance as they are not the sorts of foods that are on offer all the time.

feel free to pm me but how i try it is by doing mr T online once a month to get all the bargains and everyday stuff and stock up the freezer. Now i do aldi for the fresh fruit and veg and odd bits and bobs and do asda . i try to go the the shops as little as possible so i do not spend extra and only get what i need. But i will spend extra if things are on whoopsies or special offer even if this then causes me to go budget for the month. This now means again next month i can cut right back and have a very low budget maybe £200 and with that i will still be buying whoppsies and speacials to put away for the following month. i will travel to other shops if needed this month was sainsburys twice to get milk ( i freeze it so get in as many as i can ) they had it 2 for £2 so i got all this months then went back saturday to get 20 more 2 litre cartons to get me as far in to may as i can.

I meal plan for a month buy seeing what i have in the freezer and cupboards then put anything else i fancy on the tesco shop. this month i only had to buy for about 8 and 5 of them were for fridays when we have fish days and next month should be even less.

hope this helps a little as i say pm me if you want a chat about it or ask anything

Cleosmum

Hi, can you put me down for £195 for may? Thanks!

jenid

Only 88 pence over budget for April, not too bad:D

Mind you we have no teabags so the end of this months challenge couldn't have come sooner!!

I'm going to stick to £120 for May. BUT, big but, we have a few 'special' challenges this month that might push us over our limit. On Friday we have the MSE crew coming to film us cooking and eating our Indian meal recipe that won the champagne. So we will be eating Indian every day this week to practice (I don't know why I'm worrying and so nervous, I cook this food all the time!) and also having a 'dinner party' on Friday that we hadn't planned and wasn't in the budget!

And also as the weather warms up so does our list of visitors, we have 3 weekends booked for May already. Ah well they will all appreciate the OS baking, and people always think I've been really generous when I bake them welcome things, even though it normally only cost pence:rotfl:
Add to that, we have finally found a house to buy:T and had an offer accepted so I will have to be really strong and resist all bargains and start running the freezer down, at least that will save the pennies.

Good luck everyone for your May challenges.

SmellyOldSock

Hello

can you put me down for £300 again this month, am so enjoying the challenge!

best wishes
Charlotte

mandy_moo_1

Morning all :wave:

just catching up with all the posts. i don't think ANY of you have "failed" the challenge, as so many of you say you've changed your buying habits ie going to aldi & lidl instead of Mr T's all the time, and judging by what i've read, theres a lot of cooking from scratch going on as well

i can't wait for the May thread to be up and running ( bet you're busy in your a"pot"ment aren't you Mrs Mc? )

April's challenge wasn't too bad for me as i had 2 freezers full of stuff, and i used all the advice on here about bulking meals out with veg & a sneaky bit of porridge oats :shhh: so i think the real challenge is gonna be this month for me as my freezer's have taken a bit of a battering this month!!

I should probably try to lower my budget a bit, but i'm gonna stick to my £60 p/wk for this month and see how i get on. That's for myself, DD17, DS 14 and my 3 babies ( that's dogs to anyone who doesn't own a dog & know how daft you can feel about them :rotfl:)

i think my main downfall each month is buying chocolate. i have 2 or 3 bars every night :eek: i'm a total chocaholic, i know!! :rotfl:

anyway, my first week for May started today, and so far i haven't spent a penny....mind you, i haven't been out yet!!

Good luck to everyone in the new challenge, if you've started yet x

witchmabel

Well, April was a big flop :rolleyes: Not only did I not keep up with this thread and post my progress But I also spent a whopping £407 :eek: :eek:


Mrs M, please put me down for £175 this month. I know I can do that - and I've got a veg box on weekly order, so less trips to Mr S or Mr W. And, last month when it was obvious I was going over, I bought lots of stuff and made and froze loads of evening meal stuff.

Cheers

Witch M

redmel1621

WOW I have just added up all my food shopping receipts for April...

I have spent £363.26.... But this is over 4 weeks not 5 like I had originally budgetted for so my budget should only have been £260....

I have had my shopping today for this week but am starting May challenge as of today.....so will pop over to the other board and set my target.

I just want to say, I can't believe how much i have spent in my local mini-supermarket....£125.39 (12 visits to store) for the month this is out of order, so I am going to vow to visit as little as possible or not at all for May.

Mel x

lillythecat

Hi everyone, only spent £12 this week on food which is good I know but have singularly failed in writing everything down that we spend on food so I'm not sure of our total spend.

I was going for £250 and I estimate that its going to come in at about £280 but as I say I lost track a bit . This amount wasn't too bad as had DS1 & DS2 back from Uni for a couple of weeks (and boy can they eat) and we also had a family party weekend for OH BIG birthday so as I say all in all not too bad.

So my aim for next month is to WRITE DOWN ALL FOOD PURCHASES so that I can kep track of the actual spend. I'll be starting this weekend and so can you put me down for £250 again please.

Lilly the Cat

PS have just managed to defrost one of my two freezers which was doing a very good impression of the North Face of the Eiger and had iced up the top two compartments. Only had a little wastage of UFOs (un-identifable food objects) which was mainly bits of left overs I couldn't bear to part with at the time. Note to self - label things better next time. So have room for a good stock up and some room for all the lovely veggies I'm planting in the garden

Decla

Somehow I managed to come in under budget despite two nights out. OH did buy us three takeaways though this month. My main difference seems to be lack of waste which is positive. My fridge is less full but I use everything in it.

I'd like to be put down for £200 for May please.