Just had to put a food shop on the credit card, fed up!

[whatsausername]

We don’t get paid until next Thursday. I’d ran out of essentials like coffee, hand wash, toothpaste, chips etc. Needed the usual packed lunch stuff too. £78 in Asda. I have £82 in the account until payday but need to keep it in as direct debits due day before payday.

I just feel bleugh. We both work full time and having to put a weekly food shop on a credit card is just soul destroying.

anyone else feel like this?

Same here. I always pay for all the shopping with a cashback credit card. However I never use the credit facility, otherwise it would cost more and the cashback wouldn't be worth it. So I pay off the credit card in full every month.

Yorkshire teabags obtain more and better quality tea so we can use 1 teabag to make 2 mugs of tea so, for us, doesn’t work out more expensive than weak cheap teabags. However, if you are the only one drinking tea the Yorkshire tea would be more expensive

I usually watch a lot of TikTok ideas for cutting back spending in the supermarket on grocery shopping

for example buying a piece of Gammon for £4 in Aldi and cooking it off then slicing it with a sharp knife gives me double the amount of ham for sandwiches than buying in the packets of ham.

Having a couple of simple suppers, chicken kebabs and home made flat breads, jacket potato and tuna and cheese, cheap etc.

drinks are water of diluting squash in reusable bottles

the biggest con is bread - ive been making my own bread and its costing around 50/60p a loaf and it takes me 3 minutes to prepare in the morning - leave all day to prove and then cook in the evening . he does the same recipe for a loaf if you look on his YouTube site. I don't put in a casserole dish any more but place on paper on a pizza tray.

This is our weekly shop for 2 adults and 2 cats. We bulk buy from the butchers so this is only fruit/veg and other weekly essentials.

No matter what supermarket we use it's always roughly the same and we don't use branded, it's always supermarket own.

£78.00 doesn't go far at all

I have started buying store cupboard items from B&M and this saves a lot

If you spend £250/300 on main shop, then £50/week for packed lunches that's a whopping £450/500.00/mth for 3 people. A large chicken would do sandwiches for 3 for 2 days (5.50) cooked meats, cheese and salad would come to nowhere near £50. Even with a piece of fruit and packet of crisps each. Drinks buy squash and take that in bottles, maybe it's where you shop, I've no idea. Cook a joint of meat for evening meal and use some next day for sandwiches.

@Greencactusgirl I use clipper that I buy in Sainsbury’s or Waitrose , around £5 for a big box - I actually prefer it to Yorkshire as does my H

Oh thank goodness! I thought I must be being harsh! Never would I have thought of coffee or chips as essentials!
In addition to what you stated I would have replaced the the cold meats with a can of chick peas to make hummus and maybe a whole chicken that could be used for an evening meal, sandwiches, a curry and soup for lunch flasks. Toothpaste is much cheaper at b and m for the same brands.

I reckon a decent packed lunch and packed snacks - sandwich, crisps, a couple of pieces of fruit and a cereal bars - woukd cost around £40 a week for four people.
It costs more than you think. Obviously you can save by buying budget versions but the OP shouldn't need to do this as a two-income family.

And how much will your money saving tips save the OP off her original bill of £78 ?
Why shouldnt she have coffee? A bag of cheap potatoes is around 1.50 same as a cheap bag of frozen chips
Hand wash about 90p no idea how much a bar of soap is these days as i buy hand wash
Im surprised you didnt tell her to brush her teeth with nettles or something equally ridiculous to save on toothpaste
And you do know waters not free ... Its only kids that think that ( before they leave home and realise theres a water bill)

Sorry but your first sentence is ridiculous.
Coffee and tea are quite clearly basics to the majority of households.
What is your point?

You can get soap for around 40p a bar.

A bag of spuds makes far more chips than in a bag of precut chips.
Look at the weight- a bag of spuds is 2.5 kgs.

OP is there any reason why you can't pay off your credit card so you don't pay interest?

I'm not being critical here but I didn't quite 'get' your subject line because every single thing we buy goes on a CC but it's paid off in full each time.

Previous generations, i.e those born in the 1920’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s didn’t eat processed crap because in fact there was little processed food (apart from things like Margarine). There was much more home cooked fresh food as many woman were at home. Supermarkets didn’t exist, so shopping was done at individual shops selling ‘proper’ food. Additionally in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s there were nutritional standards for school dinners (freshly cooked 2 course balanced meal), no pizza, turkey twitters and the like. Little snacking between meals. The increase in life expectancy is due to advances in medical care.

My shopping is £100 -120 a week for just me and my partner (it used to be £65 ) and I meal prep like a demon

I noticed things like mince has gone from £3.59 - £5.19 mayo used to be 2.50 now 5 a bottle

But it’s no different it’s still borrowing money whether over draft or credit card

I'm glad you've said this because this is genuinely what I thought was normal. I purchase every last thing on my credit card, childcare, school trips, even all my monthly and annual insurance premiums go on there. Then I just use my salary to pay it off in full at the start of each month then start again building up the balance.

But if OP pays it off in full when she gets paid, that will leave her with £78 less that month. And as she was short this month there's a good chance she will be even more short if she is starting off with -£78. It's a slippery slope I guess, unless you know the following month will be easier financially.

What’s better, overdraft or credit card?

(serious question; surely the interest on the overdraft is going to be less than the credit card?)

This again…the processed food industry is far older than this, and much more extensive than you think. Tinned, dried and processed food has been around from the late 19thc. Where do you think all the lard, Horlicks, Bovril, boiled sweets, Spam, Camp Coffee, sugar cake, powdered egg, powdered dried milk, Coca-cola, tinned suet pies (in fact suet and lard too) and meat paste etc. came from? The dried food fairies? Many of the most famous foods of the early twentieth century and wartime were actually ingenious ways of using up the byproducts of the new mass farming and slaughter industries, brewing industry and so on.

It really is weird that people are so invested in this myth of the totally fresh food everyone was supposedly eating despite knowing all about what they ate as children, the repeated food industry scandals throughout the twentieth century, plus the huge prevalence of heart, liver, kidney disease and dementia in the generations born from 1900 onwards. Why is every second boomer these days on stations to lower their cholesterol? Because so many in the previous generations died from preventable heart disease.

I mean, I was born in the 70s and I remember what people ate then, as well as when the population started to be warned about high salt diets, processed foods, additives, high saturated fats, reducing cholesterol, and so on. I remember all the older people with preventable illnesses. Were you all just not there, or just not noticing?

@Greencactusgirl

This again…the processed food industry is far older than this, and much more extensive than you think. Tinned, dried and processed food has been around from the late 19thc. Where do you think all the lard, Horlicks, Bovril, boiled sweets, Spam, Camp Coffee, sugar cake, powdered egg, powdered dried milk, Coca-cola, tinned suet pies (in fact suet and lard too) and meat paste etc. came from? The dried food fairies? Many of the most famous foods of the early twentieth century and wartime were actually ingenious ways of using up the byproducts of the new mass farming and slaughter industries, brewing industry and so on.

It really is weird that people are so invested in this myth of the totally fresh food everyone was supposedly eating despite knowing all about what they ate as children, the repeated food industry scandals throughout the twentieth century, plus the huge prevalence of heart, liver, kidney disease and dementia in the generations born from 1900 onwards. Why is every second boomer these days on stations to lower their cholesterol? Because so many in the previous generations died from preventable heart disease.

I mean, I was born in the 70s and I remember what people ate then, as well as when the population started to be warned about high salt diets, processed foods, additives, high saturated fats, reducing cholesterol, and so on. I remember all the older people with preventable illnesses. I saw all the people around me eating Mr Kipling, deep fried chips, cheap “ice cream” made out of hydrogenated fats (not dairy!), Bisto gravy, Knorr dried packet soup, cheap gristly beef burgers and chopped-and-shaped chicken items made out of skin and meat byproducts, biscuits, pies and bottles of fizzy sugared pop (used to be delivered on every council estate!)

Were you all just not there, or just not noticing?

It's soul destroying but how did you spend £78 on coffee, chips (surely not essential - you know, potatoes?), hand wash and toothpaste etc? I'd say that's about £15 - £20 worth - £78 is a major shop! I shopped in Aldi two days ago and shopped for me for a week, based on 7 days of menus (for meals which are for 4 people, but one cannot buy 2 spring onions and half a lemon afaik and chicken breast doesn't come in less than packs of 4 nor e.g. minced beef in less than 500g packs) + loo roll etc and 2 bottles of wine, and it cost not much more than you spent on essentials plus oven chips (and is likely to see me into next week as well). It can be hard but making a menu and then a list, sticking to the list and shopping at discounters such as Lidl and Aldi (and picking up the bits they don't sell - Aldi don't sell capers!? - elsewhere), can cut the food bill enormously.

Agree @Greencactusgirl Tinned food has been around since the early nineteenth century (I think it was a way to transport food for Napoleon's troops) and the 50s and 60s that I remember were no havens of home cooked food. Certainly tinned peas, beans, tomatoes etc were around as well as the beginning of 'ready meals' in e.g. tinned pies and puddings and things like 'Vesta' curries. Things got worse, I think, in the 80s when the governments of many European nations (I daresay elsewhere, too, and in the US earlier) began pushing for women with children to go out to work and wanted to boost the processed food industries. These two things drove in the UK the ending of 'domestic science' (proper teaching of nutrition and food preparation), replacing it with 'food science' which was geared towards preparing children to enter the processed food industry and to want to buy its products. The old processed food, e.g. bacon, ham etc also began to be 'processed' in non-traditional and faster ways to fill a growing market - and these processes were a lot less healthy than actual 'kippering' or smoking or curing bacon by traditional means (means which had been, in the nineteenth century, regulated to prevent adulteration btw).

Wow. I'm guessing you've never struggled. Coffee is the only hot drink I ever have. I buy either Asda or Aldi own brand. We don't have an air fryer or chip pan so frozen chips it is.
As for just have water, are struggling people not allowed anything remotely nice?
We aren't particularly struggling but we have in the past had to decide whether to pay a bill or eat and it's soul destroying.

Exactly. You can go through everyone's shopping picking it to pieces, but either cutting essentials (!) such as coffee out or paring everything down to the cheapest possible was not the OP's point, as far as I can see.

You can make your own oven chips thus: chip potatoes, parboil if you wish for a speedier cook, spread on a baking tray lined with baking parchment and sprayed with oil, spray chips with oil. In oven for 20 minutes.
Wedges, do the same, don't parboil though.