Since when was £1000 a month enough for a food budget?

[BitCoinBillionaire]

We are a family of 3 adults - my youngest still at home being 19. We don’t buy alcohol and have 2 cats. Like to eat as well as possible and I’d really been noticing I’d been overspending lately so decided to use ChatGPT to work through a budget with me

I want this budget to include all food, cat food and household type bits - of which I’m generally well stocked up on anyway. I also wanted this budget to just cover August to see how it goes

I’ve put a figure on it of £1000 and ChatGPT has been helpful in helping me see how to divvy it up etc into pots (I’ve previously just been spending as I feel) but tells me that ‘£1000 is very doable to not generous’

Not generous! Is this where we are at now? A grand a month is considered ‘a little tight with not much wriggle room.’

Thoughts? Are you spending this? More than this? I know it’s like asking how long is a piece of string but I think it’s highlighted to me that I need to perhaps meal plan a bit more!

I’m not relying too heavily on AI btw. I used it as a tool and it made me see that weekly Monzo pots is a good idea as opposed to me just spending out my bank account each week - my budgeting skills are rubbish and this made me to see a ‘hard line’ budget per week may help

I’m also not swimming in money. I’m not poor but I’m not wealthy at all. £1000 for everything household related / food is really all I want to put in

I just wondered what other people thought - someone mentioned 50 quid a week. There’s no way I could do that and not feel miserable

The average US family spends around $1000 a month on groceries so ChatGPT is more likely to say that.

If you imagine it's picking balls from a massive bag of answers, with a number written on each ball. In that bag are 390 million US answers and 70 million UK answers. What is most likely to be written on any ball it picks?

Lit the same family as you. Three of us, one being 18 and two cats. I budget 500 but we are all picky eaters and 2 veggies .
I could see how £1000 could be spent though if have salads, bread etc with every meal.

There should be a "totally agree with the first part and not at all with the second" button

Exactly this.

It might be more useful to tell it ‘I have a weekly food budget of £100 (or whatever yours is). I need three meals a day for three adults. Plus one cat. I shop at Tesco. Write me a meal plan and shopping list. Include some treats. Mix of meat and vegetarian meals across the week. No alcohol. Cat needs 2 tins a day.’

i just tried this and it gave me three daily meals, a priced up shopping list and ideas to save money.

Remember ChatGPT is still largely trained on American consumer habits. And public content, a lot of which is influencer driven buy-buy-buy.

For example the other day it told me ‘I’m so impressed you drive a used car and don’t want to upgrade to a brand new SUV’. I literally had to explain to it the concept of European thinking 🤣

Next it will be impressed we wear outfits more than once.

I’m one person and while I’m not a good example as I’m not a big eater, £35 per week for me is a big shop, so let’s say £150 a month. Shop at M&S, sometimes Sainsbury’s, diet is very heavy on vegetables and fresh food, often eat items which some consider luxury, like fillet steak or seafood.

£1,000 a month on food I wouldn’t know what to do with, maybe feed the neighbourhood

Let’s not enter the era where we take to heart what a 🤖 says, please

Give over.

I’m also very fussy and eat differently to my husband and son. Just to be awkward. I’m vegan and they’re not.

I tried basa fillets last week in some blackened fish taco recipe. £2 for 2 fillets as opposed to £7 for 2 cod fillets.

they both hated it. So even when trying to cut corners it rarely works.

Again, to be clear, I’m not putting my faith into AI. I’m well aware of its limitations and I’m not quite stupid enough to believe what it churns out

and of course there are lots of people happily living on £35 a week for food.

but it’s slowly dawning on me that perhaps a grand a month for 3 adults isn’t exactly living some mental high life and that’s just how it is now

I used to regularly buy nice big bags of crisps for example. I’d get kettle chips on offer for a quid a bag. Now? On offer at £2:50 a bag.

multiply that across everything you buy and well… it’s like the Wild West out there

Well it’s a bit more sophisticated than that these days, it’s not simply predictive text, most models are agentic these days so there is a bit more going on to build and review answers.

It’s all about how you’re prompting it OP, it sounds like you had just given it a figure and it was validating it, if you want it to challenge and assess the figure, you need to tell it to do that.

@Attenboroughsmistress small reminder but … that’s not true at all. It’s a fool who puts total store in it but it’s not predictive text

Whatever it is, I just don't understand why some people seem to need AI for things like this. Surely a person knows if their shopping is costing too much.

I'm always amazed at these threads. I suppose if you have the money,you can spend it. I have a friend with one adult son,who spends this, but she shops every day at m and s. One small dog who is overweight. This doesn't include her toiletries and cleaning stuff. She also eats out several times a week..my DD has 4 kids,2 teenage,so 4 adult size appetites,2 toddlers and Spends half of that. She shops at Lidl, Aldi as we do (pension) and is a dab hand at yellow stickers. Other DD went to m and s the other day, got a £40 BBQ pack of meat for £12 and it's in her freezer.

We’re a family of 5 (2 adults, a teen and 2 pre schoolers) and spend about £150 a week. Takeaways maybe once or twice a month.

I feel like I manage to feed us quite well on £150 a week, probably even shave it down if we had to. I dread to think the cost when the little ones are eating as much as my teen currently 🥴

You shouldn't believe ANYTHING chat GPT says to you.

£1000 a month is insane for 3 adults and a cat. Unless all of you are training for the Olympics or something or have insane dietary requirements.

Afraid I spend considerable more than £1000pcm on the ‘grocery’ shop (incl toiletries, cleaning products etc). We do drink alcohol and have dogs - but we buy wine direct from Majestic and dog food from a raw food supplier so that’s often not included. I know that my kids have many of the luxuries (pre-made drinks, snacks such as nuts) and as one of them is 6ft4 and 18 his food needs are higher than most, so there are plenty of savings to be made if we wanted to, but we never throw food away, only buy what we plan to eat and I do buy which ever brand of ketchup, washing tabs/conditioner/shampoo is on offer.

But no, I struggle to see how people feed a family of 4 on £150 a week, which I often see quoted here, when a loaf of decent non-white bread, pack of butter, packet ham and 6 tomatoes costs a tenner. And that’s just one lunch of sandwiches?

Am waiting for both DC to go to uni this September and am interested to see the impact on my bill. Am anticipating it will drop by more than half!

OP seems to have misunderstood the type of intelligence a LLM has. It's very 'intelligent' for many things but doesn't think like a human.

@Shittyyear2025 it’s not insane though is it? You think it is … that doesn’t make it a fact

we are not dining out on caviar of an evening. We do like nice salmon, cod, chicken, prawns, beef … it’s tricky to buy those cheaply.

for example, I bought 5 frozen salmon fillets last week on offer. £11.50. They were small fillets. They did two evening meals with fresh pasta in a homemade sauce using oat cream , lacto free cheese and garlic. Served with broccoli - the other meal was with baby new potatoes and green veg

nothing massively extravagant

But you're not going to be spending £11 a day on breakfasts are you? A bowl of cereal on work days plus throw in a couple of eggs and bacon at weekends isn't going to come anywhere near £77 a week...

£33 a day to feed 3 adults and a cat is a ridiculously expensive budget

I have found at the supermarkets (and shops more generally) that some stuff has gone up an incredible amount while other stuff is still reasonably cheap.

processed things like ready meals and biscuits and crisps have gone up a lot, basic carbs like rice or pasta not so much.

at the moment with it being summer I’m eating a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables and as long as you mix it up it’s pretty reasonably priced.

so at the market yesterday I got corn on the cub which I’ll roast, loads of cherries and strawberries and cabbage and carrots which I’ll eat raw as accompaniment and courgettes and onions which I’m roasting and then mixing with cous cous fir a salad.

@AnonyMumAuDHD I dread the weeks of nut buying! Add in olive oil , Greek yogurt, pine nuts (may have to stop these!) fresh bread, decent cheeses …

like I said, I like to eat nice food without being totally insane

I asked chat gpt what was a sensible budget for food and toiletries per month for my family of 5 (3 adults and two 15 year olds). It said £800 if careful, £1000 if comfortable and £1300 if luxury items are included.

You’re right that agentic is a thing but your standard AI chatbot is very much still mostly just an LLM, for it to become “agentic” the OP would have needed to up an agent with additional context, workflows etc, which I doubt they did but could be wrong!

3 people (2 teens rather than adults), 2 cats (with expensive tastes) - supermarket (Lidl) food alone, I spend 600ish - so with cats, extra shops for toiletries/cleaning/special occasions I could see that it could be a grand a month I spend TBH. If you included the occasional Mcdonalds/sushi then yeah a grand is fair enough.

It's not tight though - that's with me buying whatever I want to buy, including a bottle of wine a week - albeit at a budget supermarket, and without expensive cosmetic/cleaning tastes.

So, two meals using 5 salmon fillets (plus pasta, lacto cheese and cream, garlic) cost what, £15 for 6 meals, or £2.50 a portion. If you're having that every meal you're still spending less than £700 a month?