to ask what you think is a reasonable food budget is for a student living in digs?

[grovel]

DS was "fully catered" in his college at university last year. Now moving into digs with 4 friends. Monday to Friday they are each going to take turns to cook for the others in the evening. I'm trying to work out a budget with him for food, loo rolls, cleaning materials etc. Any thoughts?
I've cut this lots of ways and have got answers ranging from £20 - £50 per week.

Fair enough.

CogitoErgoSometimes Tue 13-Sep-11 14:50:35
".... should add. About £10/day until the money runs out and then diet is reduced to doritos only."

Found both your posts very accurately hilarious, CogitoErgoSometimes !!

I think I used to spend about 60 pounds and that would last me about 2 weeks, but who knows how much I spent in between that time on choccies, cafe food, takeaways....[remembers time when takeaways were bountiful]...

Also whoever said that you get used to being in debt is completely right. At one point I was 900 pounds into my overdraft of 1000, and I STILL went on nights out/takeaways. It just doesn't seem real!

when DD1 was at uni in london i set up a Tesco.com account which she would use to order food and then i would pay for it with my card. she came up with this as she was pissing the money we were sending up the wall and she needed to eat!!!

i would put in extras for her and at christmas i would order her and her housemates everything to put on a big turkey dinner complete with choc santas and crackers.

"Digs" means lodgings doesn't it? As in bed and board? Obvious though that after 3 pages the OP is actually talking about a shared flat.

It's a great intention to have, and if it works out then it should save them both time and money, but I echo earlier posters that they need to make sure they've had a proper chat and plan it a bit beforehand.

• Are they intending to do a menu at the beginning of the week or make it up each day? If they have a menu then they can do their shopping in advance, but if not then person C who cooks on Wednesdays might buy the ingredients for spag bol the weekend before only to find that person A picked spag bol for Monday and person B's pick for Tuesday was tuna pasta.

• They do need to have a vaguely similar outlook on food. I shared with two friends and we bought all the food together and shared cooking - when I made macaroni and cauliflower cheese I was happy with just pasta, cauliflower and then a cheese sauce. My male housemate J was the type who doesn't think he's had a proper meal if there was no meat in it and would regularly pester me to put bacon in it, and my female housemate R thought we'd develop scurvy if we didn't service it with salad (even though there was a good portion of veg with the cauliflower). It took a good few months to get used to each others' habits and to stop the more regular disagreements!

• Similarly if they have vastly different budgets and thoughts on the quality of food, or different appetites then it will just end up in a big fight. If one person sticks to smart price everything while someone else insists on free range eggs and meat, there will inevitably be bitterness when one spends three times as much on their meals for the house, adding sliced truffles and quails eggs to the fry ups while someone else refuses to eat the battery hen omlettes. Plus if they share other foods like sandwich products too, there's always one in the house who will consume an entire block of cheese and all the ham/chicken/other sandwich meats by Monday evening leaving nothing else for the rest of the week. This just leads to anger and people marker-pen monitoring the milk consumption.

DD2 shares a house with 5 other students. They did think of cooking for each other but decided it was easier and actually cheaper to just each so their own thing. They do do take turns in buying loo roll. Kitchen roll etc.

£40 pw seems about right.

I was thinking 40 quid/week as a min., they are all young lads and bound to eat stupid amounts of food.

£30/40 pw and then perhaps a lump sum at the start of term, (couple of hundred,maybe more?).

BTW does anyone know which supermarkets do those student food cards?

TIA