AIBU to ask for help to get groceries down?!

[Chihuahuacat]

I keep reading on here how people spend about £300 a month on groceries for a family of four.

There’s just 2 of us and 2 cats and this month we’ve spent £460!! I don’t know where I’m going wrong...

meals have been (these are split between me and DH):

Today -
Bottle of red wine
Chicken and roasted veg / potatoes
Avocado and egg on ryvita
Baby bell
Snack a Jack
1 Aldi moser Roth chocolate (I’ve had one of these each day to save me listing it out).

Saturday:
Fish finger brioche sandwich (Aldi brioche, fish fingers from the freezer so no spend in the £460)
Half a pizza express margarita pizza
Bistro bagged salad
Sun dried tomatoes
Parmesan (from the fridge)
Bottle of Prosecco (Aldi £7).

Friday:
Turkey burgers (homemade) in the Aldi brioche buns, Sweet potatoe wedges
Lunch was leftovers from Thursday night.

Thursday:
Lunch: homemade chicken pie and veg (leftover)
Dinner: chicken breast with quinoa, broccoli (Nando’s flavour bag).

Weds:
Lunch: leftovers (the salmon as below).
Dinner: chicken pie as above.

Tuesday:
Lunch: leftovers (sausage and mash)
Dinner: tinned salmon, lettuce, eggs, green beans.

Monday:
Lunch: cream cheese bagel
Dinner: sausage and mash

I don’t really eat breakfast (maybe have a baby bel), husband has cereal. We bulk buy cat food / litter and buy about 8 bottles of wine a month (from Aldi, probably under £50). No alcohol in the week. Share a bottle sat / sun.

Laundry detergent etc is bulk bought so it’s not that. No real waste as we always have leftovers for lunch the next day.

We do buy nice instant coffee from not being in the office, but that’s about £3.

Will buy things like Diet Coke, mini eggs but not much at all, maybe once a week. A packet of snack a jacks.

Am I going horribly wrong or is this just what it costs? We obviously try and eat fairly healthy but nothing excessive I don’t think?

Any tips? We can afford it but I’d love to get it down, it feels like such a waste. We probably get takeaway a couple of times a month on top of this as well!!

I’ve attached a pic of my spending!

Lot of meat, booze, prepacked veg in small packs.

Instead, Buy boxes of wine.
Buy whole chickens and get every scrap off it, or large meat cuts.

Start by buying ALL basics from Aldi or Asda:

Kitchen rolls
Toilet rolls
Cereal
Butter
Milk
Cheese
Eggs
Jam
Fruit
Veg
Flour
Sugar
Tinned tomatoes
Pulses

Buy large pack (branded) cleaning products and laundry liquid etc from home bargains.
Or buy shop brand from Asda/ Aldi.

Meal plan

I do the above and buy other stuff (meat/fish) and luxury food items from wherever I like.

In other words stop buying branded basics!

Add to my list above
Pasta
Rice

Why don’t you do all your shopping at Aldi and do one big shop with a list? Your receipts look fine but you shouldn’t need to go to the shops again in that wk.

One thing that jumped out at me was the oil at £5.50 a bottle. Is that to cook with or make salad dressings with? If just for cooking Aldi do a really good rapeseed oil for £1.50 (cheapest in a mainstream supermarket is £3). If it's for salad dressing you will need olive oil but does it need to be such an expensive one?

I shop at Sainsbury's and don't find them expensive but everything is own brand apart from cleaning stuff as I have eczema. 3 people plus a cat and we probably spend 300 per month for food (almost all cooking is from scratch), toiletries, cleaning and the odd piece of clothing. No alcohol, flowers maybe twice a year! Shampoo, conditioner and shower gel are bulk bought online.
None of that is said to boast (as there's always someone ready to criticise ), but so you can compare.
I've been vegan since Jan and that's probably saved about 50 per month as I was regularly going way over 300 and sometimes up to 400.
I meal plan roughly but a lot of my shop will be based on offers on non-perishable and freezables. If Oatly is £1 then I'll buy 8 rather than just the 2 that i need because the saving is substantial. I hardly buy offers on fresh non-freezable stuff though.
Agree with a pp that having leftovers sounds like a 'free' meal but actually it's expensive because it means you are cooking a lot of the meat/fish dish the night before. That could have been another night's dinner.
I definitely wouldn't invest in a vacuum sealer if your objective is to save money. Just buy a load of freezer bags to reuse a million times and use a straw to suck the air out of the twisted opening .

@SquigglePigs

One thing that jumped out at me was the oil at £5.50 a bottle. Is that to cook with or make salad dressings with? If just for cooking Aldi do a really good rapeseed oil for £1.50 (cheapest in a mainstream supermarket is £3). If it's for salad dressing you will need olive oil but does it need to be such an expensive one?

It’s £3.50?

I just had a look and it on offer, so about the same price as Sainsbury’s own. So I don’t think that’s too bad.

Well you don't need de cecco spaghetti for four times the price of shops own, and shops own olive oil is fine too. And who ate all the sausages?

We realised we were spending loads because my husband was popping to the local Tesco most evenings. We stopped that and just do one big weekly shop on click and collect now. I have a budget for the week and we stick to that, easy to see how much it is when you're doing it online rather than in store.

I would highly recommend watching the TV programme "Eat Well for Less" - it shows people's shopping for a week and then they are taught how to spend less but eat better. It's really eye opening and helped me to reduce my weekly spend without really noticing a difference in taste/quality. The blind taste test on unbranded items is very eye opening!

I was reading up on oils the other day (another exciting day in lockdown) and from a health and effectiveness point of view the article said:

• for frying and roating - olive oil (standard, not extra virgin/first pressed) because it has the highest smoke point (oil with low smoke point will start to change properties and release harmful chemicals if heated to high temperature)
• for baking or cooking at low heats (So not frying or roasting ) - any standard veg oil.
• dressing - any that you like but basically this is the only time it's worth using EV olive oil so a little of an expensive one should go a long way.

What strikes me from those receipts is a huge amount of meat. Turkey fillets, chicken fillets, Turkey mince, salmon and two lots of sausages! How long does that last?

Why don’t you do all your shopping at Aldi and do one big shop with a list? Your receipts look fine but you shouldn’t need to go to the shops again in that wk.
I get Tesco deliveries as Aldi don't deliver here, but the problem here is that they have a limit of 95 items so I have to go again later in the week.

Looking at your Aldi receipt - £7.56 is spent on things for meals / essential groceries. £19.72 is on treats - prosecco, coke, popcorn, chocolate and flowers.

In Sainsbury's you are choosing premium products - olive oil, rice in sachets, the £1.65 packet of spaghetti, more chocolate and alcohol. Also herbs in packets.

To get your bills down to the £300 pm mark you need to cut out all the treats as everyday consumption - reinstate them to actual treats. Buy the cheapest version of the basics unless you acknowledge that it is going to cost you more and cut something somewhere else accordingly. You may want the expensive olive oil but that means your Branson Baked Beans need to come from Aldi. Choose less processed foods - rice in sachets!!!! why not look at your cooking schedule and put rice on first so it cooks as you finish up grilling salmon.

Herbs in packets - get your self a set of pots on the window sill and pot up the living herbs from the supermarket.

You need to make your shopping much more conscious because you have slipped into the sling it in because I am worth it mode of shopping. Meal plans and lists are useful tools, but you also need to decide you aren't worth the flowers / popcorn / chocolate each shop.

@Chihuahuacat

I’ve found receipts (from the bin....). Please be brutal!

The shorter one is the Aldi shop, the other Sainsbury’s.

(Ignore the Asda shop on the photo, that was plant holders for the garden, but even taking that out the overall spend is about average...)

I couldn't read the Sainsbury's one but the Aldi one has around £20 on wine, diet coke, some kind of chocolate eggs and cut flowers. If you repeat those impulse buys over many shops then you can see where you are wasting money.

I discovered online shopping during lockdown. Pre pandemic I was like you, I would nip into multiple shops several times a week and always end up impulse buying. Shopping once a week has made a big difference to my spending.

Shops like Aldi and B and M might be cheaper than the main supermarkets, but only if you have the self control to only buy essentials.

We spend lots also. But from your lists the things that jump out:

• a fair amount of non ‘meals’ food and extras. Ie flowers, Prosecco, chocolate, mini snacks. They total more than actual meals

• meals fairly meat heavy. If your have enough sausages for full meal then full meal next day as ‘leftovers’ than your buying double the amount needed. I would have frozen half for another week, and made a veggie meal the next day.

Meal-plan to make your shopping list, checking what tinned/dried goods you already have and only buy what you need. Use the freezer for meat you won’t use immediately, put all salad and veg into anti-deteriorate veg bags (from Lakeland) in the fridge, make soups from scratch and freeze these in 2-portion sizes. Buy bread in bulk (if you have sliced bread) and freeze, as it lasts longer once defrosted and doesn’t go mouldy. Only shop once a week. Good luck OP and hope this helps!

There’s a lot of branded food and alcohol and doesn’t seem to be much of a plan either.

Definitely need to cut down the trips, will save money plus we are only meant to be going shopping for essentials when necessary so most people I know go once every 7/10 days or book a delivery.

My observations:
Frozen meat is probably cheaper than fresh and givne you have the option of so many shops, that I'd shop for which has the best offers. Eg, I think that asda do 3 for x pounds of chicken fillets.

A lot of vegetables for the two of you and I wonder what your waste is like. Do you actually use it all? Do you ever buy frozen veg or tinned? Depending on what you're using the veg in, these can be cheaper and no different in meal result.

For me, it seems quite a lot of money on alcohol tbh.

I use a lot of leftovers, but for me they'd be the next day's main meal, even if I supplement with additional veg or salad. Then lunch would be lighter, sandwich, eggs, etc.

I also noticed you don't make use of bogof deals for items that I presume you buy semi regularly. Eg coke is frequently on offer at asda 2 for £3 which is obviously cheaper than £1.79 a bottle. So I presume this means that you're not planning ahead and making use of the deals for what I'd view as "stock" items.

Eating meat or fish a couple of times a week and eating veggie for the rest will save money. Maybe rethink some of the meals you make. At this time of the year the evenings are still cold so we are eating stews, pies, chilli, pasta dishes. This uses cheaper, more basic veg - eg onions, leeks, carrots, potatoes, cabbage. Over the winter we buy potatoes from a local farm by the 20Kg sack, which is much cheaper than a supermarket. We hardly ever buy avocados and definitely not at this time of year. If you do a big shop online once a week it would be easier to resist snack and treat foods.

@yearinyearout

Well you don't need de cecco spaghetti for four times the price of shops own, and shops own olive oil is fine too. And who ate all the sausages?

Yeah but DeCecco is so much better than most store brand pasta. Definitely better than Aldi or Lidl. I’d keep items where you can mightily taste the difference in quality and trade down on other items.

We found the Joseph joseph rice cooker perfect for cooking rice. Its 15 minutes in microwave. We but rice in bulk now (1kg) and store in a jar, nuy individual jars of herbs instead of expensive packet mixes, they last longer and are more versatile.grow herbs from seeds on window, batch cook dinner save the additional portion in freezer for another meal. Its the little things like this which will save you money. We started shopping at waitrose during lockdown its been the only shopping deliver we could get. Im looking forward to getting back to lidls and my 60 ish a week shop (2 of us, both have always worked from home)

Things like fresh herbs do add up. In summer we have a raised bed in garden with all basic herbs. Saves a small fortune if you use fresh herbs regularly

What is your freezer like OP? Is it stuffed full of food? Same with cupboards?
Try to cook things using ingredients you already have for a few weeks.

Even allowing that OP buys a lot of expensively packaged small serving premium products... that's still seeming like a lot of food for 2 adults to get thru. Where are the cheap staples like potatoes, butter, rice, basic bread?

Alkie is looking like more than £10/week, too.