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!

Sounds like ChatGPT needs better prompts, or a reality check. Very aware of the irony of suggesting a reality check for AI.
Single woman, 3 dogs. My grocery shopping bill comes in at approx £120 per month, plus dog food of about £50. I do grow a lot of veg.
£1000 seems a lot to me, but I am no longer in a multi adult household.

Wow, that Sainsbury’s shop sounds very good! I find Sainsbury’s more expensive than Waitrose and don’t rate the quality. I tend to do a mix of Waitrose and Aldi. I’m impressed with those who can make £50pp per week work, I spend more than that on lunch for the week!

But that’s not really accurate because an AI prompt will give you a different answer depending on the exact wording.

@Anarchy99 but putting AI to one side, the actual costs for people to live relatively comfortably these days are huge now. Gone are the days of one persons food costing £30 a week for example

can I ask (genuinely) what is in normal chocolate, apart from milk chocolate of course, that makes it non vegan?

spend about £200 a week on main shop + £20 - £60 on top ups. 2 adults 2 kids.

Your OP was expressing surprise that £1,000 is not seen as a generous budget according to ChatGPT. What is ‘generous’ varies for each situation, I’m only pointing out that what ChatGPT has stated isn’t in any way ‘fact’ - it’s AI and unreliable for something like that.

A single person can still live on £30-50 a week for food in any case.

It all depends on what people eat and where they buy it from.

That’s an awful lot of money! Two adults and two cats in our household.
We get a Gousto box delivered every week (five meals), which is £51, so that’s £204. I then spend anything between £40-£60 a week on the food shop (milk, eggs, yogurt, bread, lunches, fruit, dinner for the Sunday, cleaning products etc). I take my own breakfast and lunch into work.
We get a takeaway once a week, or eat out, so between £25-45.
The cats’ food is bought in bulk from Amazon and is roughly £50 a month.
In total, that’s (at the top end) £674. Realistically, it’s probably more like £600. I shop in either Sainsbury’s, ASDA or Lidl. We don’t drink, so no alcohol.

I don’t think it’s a luxurious amount but it’s obviously a lot more than many people spend. Im fortunate that at the moment Im able to spend around that much on our monthly groceries for two adults and a cat, but the vast majority of our food is organic and I buy a lot of more expensive cuts of meat and pre prepared fruit, but no alcohol.

I don’t use Chat GPT, but ’very doable to not generous’ might actually be accurate - depending on the definition of ‘generous’
We (family of 3, no pets) spend average £360 / month. But our 7 yo doesn’t eat adult portions. So I guess 3 adults plus 2 cats could be closer to average £500 - £700 a month (a lot of variants to take into
account). If £700 this would leave a £300 excess. Who’s to say Chat GPT defines £300 as generous? (I would but I’m not Chat GPT)

Id say that's comfortable.

I'm not sure what I'd be buying if I was TRYING to spend a grand a month on three of us!

We spend £40 a week for 2 adults.

I can't even imagine how you could spend £250 a week on food.

"Very doable though not generous" is a pretty wide range!

You could technically buy a big bag of rice and only eat that, so even £30 a month is "doable" as in you'd literally survive. You could technically want to have champagne and caviar and a 7-course tasting menu every night in which case £1000 wouldn't get you much further than day 1!

We are a family of 6 people. 4 children ages 6 to 14, 2 big dogs, and 2 cats. The children have packed lunches every day. We spend £650 per month, with 5 week months obviously being more of a stretch. This includes all pet food and products (kids) toiletries, cleaning products and packs of pull ups (youngest still in them) We buy our own wine/toiletries etc out of our personal spending

Hi OP 👋
I haven't RTFT, just your posts and I can honestly say I nearly dropped my phone when I read how much goes on shopping for 3 adults 😭
There's me, my DH, our DS7 and our medium sized dog (who eats like a bloody horse) and we manage to survive on £300 on food/household shopping pcm (no ale), then add an extra £100-150 on takaways/eating out pcm.
I dread to think how much it will cost when our wee boy is a hungry teen 😨

I understand you want to eat well and you are correct that prices have sky rocketed. 😔
We use our local butcher for deals (which keeps prices down) as well as local greengrocer for fresh fruit and veg.
Dog food is the dry kind ordered online (we tried so many brands) and for fish there's a mobile fish monger once per week. We are fortunate to have this on our door step and plan meals in advance, as well as having spats of batch-cooking and 'leftover/ freezer bits for tea' every blue moon when the fridge/freezer needs to be ran down. 🙌

EtA: Best thing I ever did (just before DS was born) was to download a fudget app and I opened a different/separate bank account and put 'food/house shop' money in once a month, which helped us to rein in the spends, otherwise my DH would seriously overspend on food like crazy. 🤦🏻‍♀️

ChatGPT isn't the bloody gospel and it's terrifying that so many people take its responses at face value and assume they're correct.

I use ChatGPT for a few things. It's useful sometimes. It also makes an absolute fuck-ton of mistakes and logical failures. I've had it get simple mathematics wrong on more than one occasion.

@JoyousWriter can’t you? You can’t possibly imagine an adult living on £10.72 a day for all meals and snacks (this is what £1000 a month breaks down to) ?

Maybe I can’t imagine living on your budget of £2.85 a day….

You spend £20 per person on ALL of your food, drink, household supplies and toiletries every week?

HOW? If this is real, you genuinely need to explain and break it down.

I used to live on £30 per week as a student nearly 20 years ago and that was being insanely frugal then. No meat, no nice food, toiletries from poundland etc.

@worryingday of course she doesn’t.

and if she actually does, then it’s not a lifestyle that I’m interested in. It’s just one of those ‘I can actually live on 52p a month’ type comments

Where is breakfast and lunch meals in this food prep and order, though? Or tea bags, sugar and coffee? How does a family of three manage on 6 tomatoes? We get through 4 in one lunchtime? There are 13 pieces of fruit only enough for 3-4 pieces each per week not two a day. One loaf of bread would maybe make 6 sandwiches and leave a few slices over for breakfast so not enough to last a week. And even in Aldi you cannot get 4 pieces of salmon for £4.50

Sorry but this list is massively understated. The minimum 5 a day is not represented. There is not enough food here to provide 3 meals a day and the minimum fruit/veg recommended, nor 2000cals a day unless deriving them from a packet of bourbons?

And so many household items missing- foil, clingfilm, bleach, toilet cleaner/rim block, floor cleaner, scourers, fabric conditioner, stain removers for clothing, dusters, dishwasher tabs and rinse aid, and toiletries: makeup remover, razors (ladies and mens), just doe a start, plus paracetamol/plasters/basic first aid items; nor essential cooking ingredients: salt, pepper, herbs, spices, garlic, stock cubes (those recipes are all bland as they contain none).

Add all those in and the bill will rise substantially.

@Arregaithel I don’t think that’s correct. 4 salmon fillets for less than a fiver? I’d be surprised

I don’t shop at Lidl or aldi. I’ve tried and I don’t like it much. The fruit is terrible and I hate all the ‘dupes’ of things which they never ever get right. It all looks really uninspiring too

but that’s just my opinion obviously

That’s good going for Sainsbury’s - and with the discount, I’d definitely be using that more often!

🫣 I’m hungry just reading that. What the hell do you eat?

All depends on the appetite of the bot you consulted I guess. Maybe it was very malnourished, or maybe it dines on quail, truffle and quince jelly.

ETA or maybe it doesn't eat at all and has not the faintest idea what it is talking about.

We budget £800 per month for food/household stuff for a family of 5 and 2 cats. A couple of direct debits from this - £100 a month goes on good quality cat food, £40 a month on coffee. The rest is mainly on weekly grocery shops at Aldi and top ups from our smaller, local shop. Also, take-outs occasionally, and the odd meal out. I try really hard to keep in this budget but realistically I’d say it’s more like £900 pm.