How much left at end of month?
Discussion
I 8 a 4RE said:
How do y’all eat on so little a month?
My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
£30 would take some planning and being very careful. My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
We usually spend £250-300 on food shopping per month, not including meals out/takeaways etc. And that’s eating pretty well with good quality meat from the butchers, lunch stuff for work, plenty of fresh fruit and veg.
I genuinely don’t think I would be able to spend £900 per month for the two of us if I tried, that’s an outrageous amount, it’s more than my mortgage!
I 8 a 4RE said:
How do y’all eat on so little a month?
My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Lidl. Not the veg though, that's gone off before it reaches the car. They are brilliant for everything else. A pack of mince is £4 and lasts two days, four chicken breasts are the same and last another two days. 12 pack of meatballs is another couple of quid. Spaghetti and pasta is dirt cheap. Chicken Kievs are about £2 for four. Lunch bits (wraps, chicken and ham) come to about a fiver for the week. I spend a fiver on fruit and veg from Tesco. Cornflakes are £0.80 and last 10 days. And it tastes the same as branded stuff. Most weeks are under £40. Two adults and a dog. My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
I 8 a 4RE said:
How do y’all eat on so little a month?
My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
WTF!!!My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Our weekly shop is £200 which includes meals for a family of 4 and booze for the three members over 18 on fri/sat/sun and pet food for the dog and the cat plus general consumables like bog roll, dishwasher stuff, washing powder etc etc
And we like to eat well
Admittedly we cook from scratch and don’t buy ready meals
Cheers
I 8 a 4RE said:
How do y’all eat on so little a month?
My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Flip that on its head and ask yourself how on earth you spend £30 per day on groceries for 2 people?My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Are you just buying a lot of half decent wine because food is fairly cheap in this country? Or do you throw a lot out?
djc206 said:
I 8 a 4RE said:
How do y’all eat on so little a month?
My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Flip that on its head and ask yourself how on earth you spend £30 per day on groceries for 2 people?My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Are you just buying a lot of half decent wine because food is fairly cheap in this country? Or do you throw a lot out?
ks? 
I 8 a 4RE said:
How do y’all eat on so little a month?
My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
£900 a month on food for 2 people? That’s madness. Or is half of that booze? Ours is probably £100 for a family of 4 broken down as a beginning of the week Aldi shop £70 plus a top up of fresh stuff at the end of the week (no booze) My wife and I (no kids, although that just changed) spend £900 per month.
How can you eat meat / veg / a hot meal every night for £30 a week?
Our food budget is £500 a month for 4 adults and a dog.
Its achievable at Aldi (and I guess Lidl) even eating fresh meat every night. We'll buy a big tray of chicken breast for about a tenner and this lasts three meals. Add in a homemade sauce using tins of tomatoes for example and you can make curry, Chinese, whatever very quickly and simply. Veg and fruit at Aldi is cheap, mostly because it doesn't last long, we shop twice a week to get around this. Breakfast is cereal or porridge or toast (a loaf is 59p), lunch is a salad with meat or a sandwich. Snacks is fruit, crisps and the like.
I could only imagine spending £900 between 2 if you are expecting to have expensive cuts of beef/lamb/venison most nights, shopping all organic, lots of booze, and wasting a ton of food. We rarely over buy anything, so our food waste is very small.
Its achievable at Aldi (and I guess Lidl) even eating fresh meat every night. We'll buy a big tray of chicken breast for about a tenner and this lasts three meals. Add in a homemade sauce using tins of tomatoes for example and you can make curry, Chinese, whatever very quickly and simply. Veg and fruit at Aldi is cheap, mostly because it doesn't last long, we shop twice a week to get around this. Breakfast is cereal or porridge or toast (a loaf is 59p), lunch is a salad with meat or a sandwich. Snacks is fruit, crisps and the like.
I could only imagine spending £900 between 2 if you are expecting to have expensive cuts of beef/lamb/venison most nights, shopping all organic, lots of booze, and wasting a ton of food. We rarely over buy anything, so our food waste is very small.
Our food bill is kinda high at the moment and is something we're trying to tune down. We do Hello Fresh for four nights per week (2 people) which comes in at about £42/week. That leaves three nights per week where we're not being particularly economical, on average it's probably £15 for a chippy, and £120 for a couple of nights in the pub.
A really expensive week with a celebration meal out or two and we're probably at £200/week including pub drinks.
We don't need to change much to fix that though, couple of easy meal options in the house such as a nice home made lasagne or some fresh meat for a BBQ and we could cut out the pub food and just go for drinks after we've eaten at home.
I've also been lazy AF with lunches. I work from home and on most days would drive to Subway or a supermarket for a meal deal rather than just grabbing a loaf of bread and some innards' at the start of the week. That's all been fixed since the start of the school holidays so looking forward to see how many millions we have left this month.
Our reason for fixing our food bill is purely because we've got a baby on the way so we want to see what we can do when we need to. We're putting a way a solid chunk into savings each month right now which will be used to support the Missus' loss of earnings once the maternity dries up but we'd like to think just how much change we need to make to consider her going PT for a few years after maternity leave.
We (I) spend a LOT per month on hobbies too, which is all easy to fix with a bit of discipline and it's good to know that we have that wiggle room available to us. I reckon we could cut our regular outgoings by a full salary if needed, which is reassuring.
A really expensive week with a celebration meal out or two and we're probably at £200/week including pub drinks.
We don't need to change much to fix that though, couple of easy meal options in the house such as a nice home made lasagne or some fresh meat for a BBQ and we could cut out the pub food and just go for drinks after we've eaten at home.
I've also been lazy AF with lunches. I work from home and on most days would drive to Subway or a supermarket for a meal deal rather than just grabbing a loaf of bread and some innards' at the start of the week. That's all been fixed since the start of the school holidays so looking forward to see how many millions we have left this month.
Our reason for fixing our food bill is purely because we've got a baby on the way so we want to see what we can do when we need to. We're putting a way a solid chunk into savings each month right now which will be used to support the Missus' loss of earnings once the maternity dries up but we'd like to think just how much change we need to make to consider her going PT for a few years after maternity leave.
We (I) spend a LOT per month on hobbies too, which is all easy to fix with a bit of discipline and it's good to know that we have that wiggle room available to us. I reckon we could cut our regular outgoings by a full salary if needed, which is reassuring.
95JO said:
I've started to map out mine and my girlfriends expenditure for when we buy our first house, we've budgeted £250 per month for all food, as well as toiletries. There's scope for more if required but I was hoping that'd be okay, seems we're not quite PH enough... 
That's okay, it's our budget too including takeaways and meals out. We usually see what clubcard vouchers we can convert into meals out as the value is tripled. Pizza Express cost us a fiver out of a £40 plus bill the other weekend. £12 in vouchers tripled and all we paid for was the drinks. NickCQ said:
Thread divert but I've never seen the attraction of these kind of services. Seems like an odd halfway house with all the hassle cooking from scratch but none of the money saving benefits.
I'd never recommend it to save money (at least not directly) but we did a free trial of it about 2.5 years ago and have been going solid ever since.Benefits for us:
- No weekly shop, we both hate it and this is where the indirect cost saving comes to - I can't enter a supermarket without spending £30 - it's just impossible. When this is taken away from you, a lot less useless crap gets bought.
- No figuring out what to eat each week, we now get a choice of meals (no idea what the weekly choice is nowadays, but it's a fair few) and sometimes we just leave it up to lottery to see what we get.
- Generally the quality of food is higher than we ate previously, I would say 20% of meals are "ok", 40% are decent, 35% are excellent* and 5% are awful but for a kitchen-skilled household the gains here are probably negligible
- It's not a weightwatchers type thing, but on average we're eating more healthily than we did previously
- We actually enjoy cooking, time in the kitchen is social time for us and every now and then you learn a new technique or work with an ingredient that you've never even heard of before
- Portion sizes are under control, as a house of two we could easily smash a meal for four in the past. Occasionally the meals come out a bit smaller than we'd like, but that's what emergency deserts are for.
- by excellent I mean that I'd be pretty satisfied if I ate that at a moderately expensive restaurant
- No weekly shop, though hateful it does mean that we don't regularly pick up other household items but stuff like Amazon Prime Pantry is filling that gap nicely
- Sometimes you screw up with the use by dates, to a certain extent you need to plan your weekly meals based on what expires when. Certain items just don't travel/store well so you learn to get those used sooner in the week
- Sometimes you just cannot spend 40mins in the kitchen to sort out dinner, but with decent planning they now have menu options for "20minute" meals etc which helps.
HF are now adding extra features such as the ability to pay a fee to receive 1.5x the ingredients so you can prepare lunch for the following day, and menus are expanding all the time to cater for veggies etc.
So nope, it's not a cheap alternative to cooking yourself and just figuring out the recipes and ingredients "manually", but it's a convenient way to encourage you to cook and eat properly and keeps you away from jars/frozen/previously "quick/easy" menus.
Recently worked out what me and the missus were spending on food and had a bit of a shock. It's paid out of 3-4 accounts so it wasn't easy to spot (business acc, my personal, her personal, my credit card).
Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):
Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340
The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.
Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!
Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):
Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340
The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.
Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!
magarta said:
Recently worked out what me and the missus were spending on food and had a bit of a shock. It's paid out of 3-4 accounts so it wasn't easy to spot (business acc, my personal, her personal, my credit card).
Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):
Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340
The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.
Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!
You should add weetabix to your Ocado order, would save you a fortune.Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):
Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340
The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.
Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!
I 8 a 4RE said:
I get that £900 per month is a lot now, and I’ll look into it.
The flip side of this; would be interesting to see the health of some of the low-spenders. Either skinny as a rake and / or BMI above 25.
Lidl quality is poor and a sandwich at Greggs is not a lunch.
What exactly at Lidl is poor quality, outside of their fruit and veg, which admittedly is hopeless? We've found them to be quite good.The flip side of this; would be interesting to see the health of some of the low-spenders. Either skinny as a rake and / or BMI above 25.
Lidl quality is poor and a sandwich at Greggs is not a lunch.
magarta said:
Recently worked out what me and the missus were spending on food and had a bit of a shock. It's paid out of 3-4 accounts so it wasn't easy to spot (business acc, my personal, her personal, my credit card).
Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):
Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340
The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.
Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!
You must put half of your purchases in the bin, or someone's using your card to feed another family.Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):
Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340
The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.
Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!
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