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!

@BitCoinBillionaire

Is this a wind-up?!

2 adults here. (DC have left home) We spend about £100 a week. (£430 a month.) No booze, neither one of us drinks alcohol.

£1000 a month is PLENTY for 3 adults

What on earth are you eating? Are you buying lots of ready meals? And are you all big eaters?

This sounds more like a budget for a family of 5 or 6 people. Not 3!

£1000 for three adults and a couple of cats is plenty.

As others have said, AI works with the information it has been given, and I guess lots of people have done something similar to you, put their expenses into chat GPT to look for ways to cut the budget, or put requested meal plans based off previous meal plans and then it’s costed from the supermarket etc. Given £1k a month is about what a lot of families are spending on all groceries, including cleaning items and animal food, the AI has concluded it’s about average.

We’re a family of 4 (only 2 adults) with one dog and we spend about £1k a month on all supermarket items. (Including cleaning products and pet food). The only time we spend less if we have a month where we eat out quite a bit so we need less food in the house.

Life has got expensive and wages haven’t kept up.

@Shittyyear2025. I need to get some sort of handle on it that’s true. But those 5 small fillets did two evening meals- not 6.

a salmon fillet each for my husband and son in each meal (left one over but this was small so went into the pasta!)

I have 4 teens and we spend about this. The teens eat more than my dh and I though and are constantly starving particularly as they do lots of sport. If you divide 1000 by 30 and then by 5, it works out about 6.66 per person a day for all meals ( in my kids case hats definitely 4) it doesn't seem excessive to me. If I'm honest with top up bits included etc I probably spend more.

LLM AI models often work by confirming and expanding on what you've asked them. It's telling you that your budget is doable but not too generous on the assumption that you've given it what you think is a reasonable budget.

If you are using AI in this way you really need to think critically about what it tells you. I've seen people in work asking if ChatGPT thinks something is reasonable and it says it does and then gives a big explanation of why which they use as evidence, but you could ask it if it thought the opposite was reasonable and it would do exactly the same.

Family of 3 including starving 15 year old boy on a ‘gym’ diet and a dog! We eat well, I’d say we spend half of that!

@BatchCookBabe but you’re aware we all do things differently yes? This doesn’t make me wrong and you right and vice versa

by your user name - you sound like a savvy shopper and well, obvs a batch cooker! I’m categorically not - would like to be but its not going to happen

nope, we don’t do loads of ready meals.

@BitCoinBillionaire this is where you see you need to be very careful with ChatGPT. I didn’t know many people who will spend £1000 per month for 3 adults.

Theres been a thread on here around that not long ago
Here

Dividing by pots could be interesting

I honestly don't think ChatGPT is as smart as that. A lot of what AI is doing is just confirming back to you what you've told it using whatever it has seen elsewhere to back that up.

If AI comes up with an answer that doesn't seem right, it can be a good idea to challenge it. Often, the second or third answer will be more reasonable. But it also shows that its main priority is to be agreeable - that's why they always say things like 'good question' or 'you're right to ask that' etc.

You don’t need to stand up an agent for a chatbot to be agentic. It’s how the chatbot is operating underneath. There’ll be less agentic tech on free models, but even free models are utilising it more these days.

I think that is a ridiculous amount! I spend 400 max, me and 2 v hungry teens.

No pets tho

If I lived alone I could live on £50 a week pretty easily ... except for the times that a load of household stuff ran out at the same time ... dishwasher tabs, shampoo, conditioner, cleaning stuff etc. But obv try to spread that out over the month.

I'd quite happily eat a lot of omelettes, salads, soup, jacket potatoes with beans, pasta. I'd also make a large pack of minced beef into a generic tomato sauce with soffrito and then use that for chilli, spag bog, tacos over the week.

If you’re all overweight or drink a lot it’s probably not enough. But for most it’s plenty.

I like this… £50 per person per week.. I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s pretty much how my house works out.

Plus £60 a month for the cats food, I have two and use blink because it’s a subscription service and they love it. I can swap and change between flavours up to two days before they ship the order which keeps the cats interested and mix and match jellies, pate’s and gravies. It’s just fab!

I’m a a single person household and I tend to spend about £150 per month on my main online shop. I do get some fresh meat and fish (often on some kind of multi buy deal) and some ready meals but I don’t drink alcohol and don’t have any pets. I might spend about another £150 on top-up shops and snacks/sandwich lunches out. Therefore I suppose if you’re 3 adults and a cat you might get towards £1000.
However I justify going for quality/premium brands on the grounds that eating those things out would cost a lot more!

@Switchnow I’m teetotal and have a bmi of 22 so neither applies

I think we spend around £600 per month, 2 adults and 2 primary aged kids. I cook all meals from scratch. No pets. We eat well and don’t really scrimp on snacks etc. Buy all treats from Waitrose and M & S. Regular food shop is Morrisons or Tesco wherever we get a slot. Not sure how you are spending £1000 for 3 adults unless you are eating lots of ready meals.

I would say £1000 is a lot! We are a family of 3 and spend around £650-700 on food and another £150 on household and pets (2 cats and a dog). I do however meal plan and buy pet food/most household stuff on line

Assuming it also applies to the other members of your household then you should easily be able to bring down the spend.

@BitCoinBillionaire we have meat or fish at each meal and spend a maximum of £50 per person per week.

I do a lot of the shopping at Lidl for meat. We eat chicken much more often than beef. Try to buy ‘in bulk’ - like we used to buy a whole salmon then divide it portion and freeze. We have a clear idea of how much meat per person - about 125~150g per person - and stick to that.
We also don’t throw food away. And I think that’s one area where people loose money. Any left over is frozen (often theres a single portion ish). We then have one meal where everyone picks their own portion in the freezer.

One big difference from what you said is that we don’t have beef fillet or shrimps very often. They are on the high end of the scale price wise so theyre more like a treat than everyday meals iyswim

£700 a month here, for 3 adults and a cat.
One is vegetarian and one is vegan.
It's surprisingly expensive feeding the vegan, (nut butters, fancy milks and fancy ingredients).
We also grow most of our own soft fruit, salads, potatoes and apples etc.

Yeah ours is about that, 2 cats, 2 kids, 2 adults. We eat as well as we can but it's definitely not a generous budget. All toiletries etc Inc obvs

But "nice" food (in the sense you seem to mean it) is expensive. And in that context Chat GPT is perfectly right.

You're not asking if £1000 is a generous budget for 3 adults and 2 cats. You want it to include lots of high quality pricy ingredients. And you are not trying to cut your budget to the bone, so people on here telling you that they can feed their family of 20 for a week with a chicken and a bag of rice are not really helpful to you.

I think what you can take away is that £1000 may not be quite enough to feed your family in the style that you want. So the family is going to have to decide (for example) if they are happy to swap out cod for basa or cheaper white fish or perhaps include some simpler cheaper meals amongst the more expensive ones. Or you have to increase the budget.

I also think it's helpful to have person food in a different budget to other things. Your cat food costs and household item costs are probably more regular and predictable, so it would make your life easier to work out what the average monthly cost is and hence what you have left for person food.