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in for another month. not doing to bad on the takeaways etc just need to yellow sticker and meal prep more!£365 a year spend challenge - this has included food/clothes/beauty?? who knows where I am
20,000 step a day challenge0 -
Thanks Elsie for the new thread.
Please put me down for £162, which is our usual £120 plus £42 left over from February.
- Pip"Be the type of woman that when you get out of bed in the morning, the devil says 'Oh crap. She's up.' "
2024 Fashion on the Ration Challenge 66 coupons,0 -
OK additional spends yesterday:
£8.50 Waitrose (DH's favourite ale, on offer in Waitrose, so cheaper here than anywhere else at the moment, including Aldi and Lidl!)
£23.33 Asda various bits on shopping list
£13.66 Lidl this morning - beef mince and Richmond sausages
Total now: £145.75/£300
Planning a spend of circa £4 in Aldi tomorrow. Peas, garlic bread slices, whole chicken and Worcestershire sauce. And that'll be the end of the large spends for this month.
Next week's total is anticipated to be in the region of £30. I would expect weeks 3 and 4 to be around the same. If I manage this, I will definitely come in under budget.
The challenge definitely helped to keep me under control yesterday. As I was walking around Asda's I saw so many things I would usually mindlessly put in my trolley, but as I had my shopping list, a budget and I'm dieting at the moment, I resisted all the extras (with the exceptions of seeds and a toy for DD - separate budget - also picked up more seeds in Lidl this morning - SOOO cheap!).
Also, I had two over ripe bananas in the house yesterday, and rather than waste them I used them in a Banana and Oat cookies recipe I had seen a few days earlier. So, nice little snack made for us all, and food not wasted! Win, win!February wins: Theatre tickets0 -
Hi, hope everyone is keeping well. I would like to be put down for my usual £80. I'm going to deduct the overspend from last month, which was £10.57, as most of that is in the freezer and cupboards, and will be used this month. I have spent a further £5 on 3 packs of Linda Mc Sausages, 6 avocado and a large bowl of mushrooms. I'm not intending buying anything 'till next week, as I've more than enough in stores, but want sweet potatoes, onions and coconut milk. I have updated sig.0
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Hi! I'm new and I'm in for this month's challenge. I've got a budget of £395 for two adults, one teen, one tween and a cat. It ought to be very doable judging from most of the posts on here but I'm out of practice when it comes to restraint
I've set myself a spreadsheet and am going to have a look through all the recipes at the start of the thread for inspiration.
Anyway - hello and nice to meet you all :hello:0 -
I'm still keeping my eyes peeled for a bread maker. Might give the manual method another go this weekend and see how I get on, but still leaning towards bread maker. DH is a stay at home dad to DD, and if we have the machine, he can just pop the ingredients in with her and let the machine do the rest. I fear he'd just forget about if he had to leave it to rise! haha
I'll also be making another batch of pizza dough. I lifted the last lot out of the freezer this morning for tonights tea.February wins: Theatre tickets0 -
Welcome EdithB - lots of lovely supportive people on here, and lots of ideas on how to budget, plan, and reduce your grocery spending. Well worth reading through the first few posts and one or two of the links (some have been around ages, but the wisdom holds good). We wish you success.Save £12k in 2024 - #2 target is £5000 only £798.34 so far
OS Grocery Challenge 2024 25.04% spent or £754.10/£3,000 annual
I also Reverse Meal Plan on that thread and grow much of our own premium price fruit and veg, joining in on the Grow your own thread
My Debt Free Diary Get a grip Woman0 -
As mentioned in the February challenge, we went shopping last night. We did our big monthly shop, spending £58.26 in MrT's, which included £4 for 10kg of flour. I've got a small shop planned for Lidl tomorrow (mainly for butter) and a visit to the farm shop on Sunday for eggs and veg; together this should keep us going for a week or two.
We also spent £48.20 in Costco last night, but the Meat Fund paid for that not the grocery challenge kitty. I've started tracking our Meat Fund purchases in the same spreadsheet that I use for the Grocery Challenge. It'll be interesting to see how we do over 6 months or a year. (We contribute £40/month to the Meat Fund.)
Anyway, the above brings our Grocery Challenge spend for March to £58.26/£162, leaving £103.74 for the rest of the month.Hi! I'm new and I'm in for this month's challenge. I've got a budget of £395 for two adults, one teen, one tween and a cat. It ought to be very doable judging from most of the posts on here but I'm out of practice when it comes to restraint
I've set myself a spreadsheet and am going to have a look through all the recipes at the start of the thread for inspiration.
Anyway - hello and nice to meet you all :hello:
Hello, EdithB. Welcome to the Grocery Challenge.
Most people here start their shopping list by planning what meals they're going to have for the week/fortnight. I don't but then I tend to shop for the month and not weekly, so my meal planning consists of looking a couple of days ahead and asking "What have we got in? What needs using up? What's in the diary? And if I defrost X, what can I make with it?". I keep a running shopping list, recording things as they're running low/running out and starting a new page after each shop.
My other big "tricks" are keeping a stash of long-life skimmed milk (tastes like fresh and saves running out), and batch cooking then freezing meal bases for days when I'm late home. (Do you know how many recipes start "Fry onion with garlic"? Millions. Ditto those that start with a basic tomato sauce. It's a matter of minutes to prepare enough "base" for three or four meals, and then you only have to decide what you're going to make with it when you haul it out of the freezer.)
HTH.
- Pip"Be the type of woman that when you get out of bed in the morning, the devil says 'Oh crap. She's up.' "
2024 Fashion on the Ration Challenge 66 coupons,0 -
Can you put me down for £120 again this month please ELSIE ? I seem to be managing at this amount, which includes all food, loo rolls , washing powder n dog food
"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf"
(Kabat-Zinn 2004):D:D:D0 -
A happy St David's Day to all! Here we are in March already - how did that happen?
Can you put me down for £120 again please? I'm going to try and stop anxiety-buying for the B-word now. We have enough in the cupboards to survive of it gets a bit crazy for a week or two and I don't want to end up fighting my way out of the house past the tins of tomatoes!
I started the month today with a spend of £15.29 on some fruit, veg and butter (including lemons for Tuesday!). I'm going to try my darnedest to not buy anything else before next Friday when my MIL is coming to stay so I'll need to get some bits in.
Good luck everyone!0
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