No idea how much spent on Food

I have no idea how much we spend on food but it's probably a lot! It's difficult to add up because we buy from lots of different places - meat, coffee, olive oil, beer, wine etc comes from particular suppliers online, bread from the local baker, essentials from aldi... We don't meal plan and I just shop as we need things.

I don't know either. Dh normally does the big supermarket and it's usually around £70/-£100 depending on what we need and when we last went.

Sometimes we go a few weeks between big shops and eat from the tins or freezer. We rarely eat out and we don't drink alcohol.

I often spend £10 here and there in smaller, local supermarkets if they have good reductions.

is it the champagne?

I don’t get it either, we spend about £800 a month for 5 (2 adults, 3 kids), we’re not frugal at all with shopping and eat a varied diet of decent, fresh food. We even do the odd shop in M&S food. No idea how a diet of jacket potatoes is costing £700 a month.

Easy enough to take your receipt each time though? Plus you've got the entries on your bank statements? And there's always the option of doing online delivery for your main shop, so you can see with each item what your final bill will be, plus you get the itemised online receipt before your shopping is delivered. 🌹

Get receipts.
Look at what you're actually spending.
Decide if you need to cut back and then try to identify where/how.
Food definitely isn't cheap nowadays, but in reality a lot of food prices have been artificially low for a long time and people are used to that.
I'm sure you're not alone with the 'head buried in sanditis' though.

Debit cards have definitely made mindless spending easier.

I don’t understand this. We spend £100 a week, £10 for top ups for 2 adults 1 child and 2 cats.
we eat a varied diet with fish every week, meat a few times a week and one dinner which will be pizza/easy oven meal.
We eat lots of fresh fruit, have some snacks and also have some treats on there too

I don’t know but I have a feature attached to online banking and anything remotely connected to food will be added to the grocery category, which would mean it would be visible if I ever looked.

I don’t know either. I do lots of small shops rather than one big shop and don’t really add it up. I’ll also get takeaways or eat out at least once a week, sometimes more (over the last week it’s been 4 times although that isn’t the norm). I could obviously work out how much I spend by looking at statements but like you I probably don’t want to know and don’t keep track.

p.s. My food bill is huge too! I'm blaming my dog who bumps up the bill with his fine dining (steak, lamb, chicken etc).

It's quite easy though for baked potatoes to turn into an expensive meal depending on what you put in them. One of my favourite dinners is baked potato with prawn cocktail. I buy the ready made prawn cocktail because I like the sauce in them but there is never enough prawns in them. So I buy a bag of prawns too and put 1/3 of bag into each shop bought prawn cocktail so it's bursting with prawns. Cost of meal - baked potato (not sure, buy loose large ones) so estimate 40p per potato. Prawn cocktail is about £2-2.50 and then 1/3 of a bag of prawns £4.50/3. So that's £4 approx for a 'baked potato' dinner.

Meal plan, make a list, go once a week and that's it!

I'm like pp whose DH does the shopping. We share it. I'm out at work 3 days a week so he's in charge of food on those days.
I know roughly what I spend. But no idea what he spends.
I think we spend too much. He's recently been converted to Lidl for some shopping trips so that must have cut things back.

I know that people do it, I'm the opposite in a big nerdy way. Accountant here so I analyse every receipt, code and enter it into our cashbook. I prepare a sort of P&L and variance analysis to compare monthly. It's interesting to see the rise in costs over the years.
I also use the receipts for cashback on receipt scanning apps.

£385 monthly on average for 2 and a dog and occasional visits from dd

i know this because i have a spread sheet

Well it's not difficult to find out. Look at your bank statements or receipts.

I can understand how you don't know, but it's behavioural, it's not accidental.

People can be funny about money, maybe you don't want to know, you don't want to budget, maybe it makes you anxious, maybe it makes you bored.

If you don't know, it means you're not in control of your spending. The functional thing to do would be to change this.

If you want to know, just get a receipt. Then review. Once you do that, you'll be able to cut back.

What's the main thing you do to get the total down a little. Say even 15 pounds?

^

Don't buy brands
Don't buy ready meals
Eat vegetarian

Including wine we spend roughly £230 a week.

This includes 3 x meals per day, for two adults, two kids (who basically eat like adults really).

And most of this is cooked from scratch, shopping around for deals etc.

We spend about £200 a week for four adults, a dog and two cats. It’s not so long ago that I used to allow £35 each week for evening meals, so averaging £5 per night. It’s virtually impossible now unless you want value pasta and tinned tomatoes every night!

I do most food shopping online so I know how much it is. No idea how much we spend throughout the month when popping into our local smaller shop for ‘a few bits’ though. Maybe a couple of hundred, mostly my partner.

Yes, I'm the same. I am horrified when I look through my credit card and bank account statements and see exactly how much I spend on food.

I do a click and collect order every week or 10 days where I get all the basics like milk, coffee, bread, stuff for sandwiches and stuff for some evening meals but then spend a lot on top ups and take aways.

To me shame I end up wasting a lot of food that I have bought too.

From the sounds of it you can easily afford this, so does it matter?

Husband is a mortgage adviser. One of the things he asks people to fill in is a budget planner.

Most people seem to have no idea how much they spend on necessary groceries, utilities, even fixed things like Council Tax. I know what our Council Tax bill is because I pay it, I have no idea what our utility bills are, DH pays them. I could look at the paperwork to find out our mortgage payment but DH pays it.

I have a rough idea how much I spend on groceries etc because, since lockdown, I do a weekly online shop and we very rarely need to supplement it.