To spend £30 a month on ALL food and drink?

[Jumell]

I’m single and live alone. I want to set myself a good budget and admit I’ve overspent /been wasteful in the past.

As a single adult female living alone - is £30 per month on food doable do you think ? Includes eating out etc

Quite enjoying this thread

By the way for reference I have been hungry. Waiting to get paid so I could buy food. Living on cornflakes and running out of milk. Then getting paid and buying a chocolate cake and gorging on it and feeling ill.
A lot older now! Trying to suggest to the OP that carrots are her friend!

It's making me feel like the healthiest cook on the planet and I'm really not

ETA the OPs posts that is, not the helpful menu suggestions.

OP I reckon you have the patience of a saint to not respond in kind to the many posters who have been patronising and rude.

Why didn’t you buy a massive bag of pasta, stuff to make a pasta sauce, eggs, things to have on toast, bread, potatoes for jacket potatoes?

Shopping list about £30 to set up your kitchen and feed you for a couple of days. Then maybe you can spend about £20 a week to keep eating.
Marigold microfibre cloths £3.50
Blue for the loo
Pink for the sinks
Green for fresh veggies (wash it frequently)
Vegetable oil £1.99
Sainsbury's Butterlicious Spread 500g £1.25
Sainsbury's black peppercorn grinder 50g £2.70
Sainsbury's garlic granules 58g £1.10
Stamford street ground cumin 43g 69p
Stamford street curry powder 45p
Sainsbury's soy sauce 150ml 59p
Gherkins £1.20
Blue dragon creamed coconut block £1.70
Sainsbury's greek style yogurt 500g £1.10
Black beans 400g 49p
Cannelloni beans 400g 49p
Stamford street onions 85p
2 carrots 28p
Sainsbury's frozen whole leaf spinach £1.90
Sainsbury's Omega fish fingers 10 £1.12
Loaf of bread 74p
Sainsbury's long grain rice £1.25
Red pepper 45p
Cucumber 89p
Penne pasta 500g 69p
2 x tinned tomatoes 89p
Sainsbury's green pesto 99p
Peanut butter smooth £1.09
One salad leaf choice

When you get back from the shops make a fish finger sandwich. Make a sauce for it using a heaped tablespoon of yogurt and a pile of grated cucumber (use green cloth to squeeze out most of the juice), season with salt and a tiny pinch of garlic granules, add some chopped gherkin and salad leaves. That one junk food sandwich will give you more protein than you have been eating in a day and more vegetables than you have eaten in 19 days.

Decide if you want Indian, Chinese or Italian for dinner.
Start writing you next shopping list.

Do you think it's a genuine poster then? (Not being facetious, I genuinely can't work it out)

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that the OP here has issues with being made redundant, possibly fed up with weight already and made a snap decision that £30 a month could fix everything going forward. (As in controlling something). I say this gently as money issues and existing weight are combined. I may be way off base OP?
On that note I will say there are loads of others who are in the same boat or thought the same.
£30 a week is feasible but not a month. £30 a week would allow you to stock up on herbs, spices, store cupboard, freezer space and eventually then you could easy do £30 a month.
Lots of tips on prior posts .

No idea. On balance, I feel it's better not to be rude and dismissive on the off chance they are genuine. You never know how vulnerable these posters are.

Emphatically not getting involved in this 90% batshit thread! I have a useful contribution to make, though - was extremely poor from 2010-2022 and did an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of food values. Biggest finding:

You can't beat sardines, eggs and soya for nutrition per penny. Other things come close (I ate a fuckton of mince). Family bags of chicken pieces aren't great nutritionally, but very handy for cheap & quick dinners.

I can't digest beans & pulses, but they aren't complete foods in any case. Good fillers if you can stomach them, otherwise use brown rice and wholewheat pasta.

Frozen fruit & veg are just as good as fresh, often more economical, and don't go off which is an issue when you live alone.

Only buy bakery goods when they're yellow-stickered.

If you look at "Feed Your Family for £20 a week" she has some emergency meal plans for people who are really short of money, but they're not intended to be used long term. (And I think even the cheapest is £10 a week.)

In future, buy frozen fruit (very good in porridge IMO) and frozen veg (sometimes as a student I'd eat pasta and frozen veg, with cheese grated on top).

If you have a freezer you could get some mince and bulk it out with lentils and grated carrot, make a load of spag bol (well the bol part)! and freeze.

OP, I think you have disordered eating. I have a friend who lived in food poverty as a teenager, and this is the sort of challenge she used to set herself as a student/young adult. I wasn’t old/experienced enough then to realise why she was doing it - just spent a lot of time feeling bad that I couldn’t keep my food bill as low as hers. It is not a good idea. Even then, though, my friend would focus on porridge/lentil soup (alongside Haribo and custard creams). She still doesn’t have the healthiest relationship with food (lived on steamed veg for a month to lose weight) but has more of a focus on nutrition these days. Do you know why your reaction to losing your job was to decide to reduce food to this extent?

To be honest it wasn’t a reaction to losing my job. I got a very good redundancy package.

Around May 2020 in Covid lockdown had one week of living off a VERY cheap food budget. I wanted to see if I could match it

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this post even if the posts were critical - after all - I did ask for feedback on my situation! Thanks especially for everyone who took time to post the good wholesome recipe ideas.

To answer people’s questions - I’m not a troll - genuine poster. My money saving quest started on Tuesday 12th November is still going strong.

HOWEVER, i wanted to set the record straight on something as don’t want to be misleading.

Checked through all my records last night and definitely haven’t stuck to my £30 target! So sorry to sound misleading BUT -

it is true that from 12th November until now I’ve spent less than £30 in cash on all food drink - £29.83 in fact.

However - checking on my Nectar App last night - sorry guys - but I’d spent £10 worth of Nectar points on food/drink - so in other words I’ve spent £40 on food/drink in 3 weeks and not £30 a month.

Also had a doughnut and small box of chocs so one could argue that these add up to £45 if all benefits in kind are included.

So to date - realistically since November 12th I’ve spent £2 a day on food rather than my target of £1.

i only had half jar of coffee, tea bags and salt /vinegar in on the 11th nothing else !!

anyway thanks all for your feedback !

I’m sure I read somewhere that beans and pulses aren’t a complete protein (as in, they don’t contain all 12 amino acids - only animal products and tofu do) but if you pair them with rice, then you do get a complete protein?
I love beans and pulses but have become
much more of a meat eater and worship the MN weekly roast chicken 😂

im sure you prepare a massive salad to go with said weekly roast chicken 🤣

No 😂
I do a lazy roast dinner once a week (frozen yorkshires, frozen roast potatoes… you get the idea) and use the rest for wraps for lunch 😋

Sounds lovely actually.

forgive me as I hardly do any cooking but this is something I intend to change -

a cooked roast chicken lasts a week if refrigerated?

I use mine in 4 days max

Have you got things in already lime a good stock cupboard of essentials and things in the freezer? If so, it may be doable

No not atm

I have to say I am impressed.

No. Greggs cost more than £1 which is your budget for that day. Ok it be just over a £1 but still you blown your budget and where's your fresh veg and fruit. Maybe £30 per week not month.

Have you cooked meals before OP? Do you have your own kitchen and pans etc?
I only ask because its unusual for you to have nothing at all in the house except tea and coffee, when you started your budget challenge
And all the things you bought needed no preparing or cooking, but we're basically snacks.

When asked what you ate before you have been a bit vague with "too much junk/takeaways etc"

Fairly basic suggestions you've thought were a good idea...but it didn't occur to you to make any actual meals at all? Even things like beans on toast, jacket potatoes or noodles (minimal prep and no particular skills required, but do requite some cooking) Buying a whole pizza from a supermarket and cooking it for 2 meals would likely be cheaper than buying 1 slice of pizza from Greggs.

It might be worth looking at books or websites aimed at students with basic store cupboard "set up" and easy and cheap meals to make using basic equipment

OP I think if you really want to focus on curbing your reliance on convenience / junk food you'll need to step up with the homecooking.

And to do that you'll need to break it down into manageable steps and to realise that if you live alone, you need to ensure that you're looking after yourself properly so you stay well & healthy.

I think your first step is to think about the sort of food you would like to be eating on a daily / weekly basis. What sort of things do you think you could manage ti cook easily? Start simple & work your way up to more ambitious dishes.

Do you have a cooker? An oven? A microwave? Cooking utensils? You'll struggle without these.

Start with only concentrating on one week at a time. Plan out what meals you would like to eat..3 x meals a day + snack.

For instance:

Breakfast: weetabix with milk + banana & tea or coffee x 7 mornings

Lunch: cheese sandwich x 2 days, soup & brown bread x 2 days, scrambled eggs on toast x 2 days, Gregg's pizza slice x 1 day

Dinners: buy a pack of mince & make bolognaise x 2 dinners with pasta & sprinkle of cheese. Freeze the rest for another week. Buy some chicken thighs & jar of curry sauce & pack of rice - chicken curry x 2 dinners & freeze the remainder. Baked potatoes x 2 nights with cheese & beans. Supermarket pizza on 7th night.

This way you end the week having eaten proper food & starting the next week with some meals already in the freezer ready to go. You keep rotating these each week.

But if all you have in stock is tea & coffee you'll have to build up a basic store cupboard. This will make making & planning meals far easier.

You'll need stuff like

Oil
Butter
Seasoning - salt & pepper
Herbs - mixed Italian is a very versatile one
Spices - you can build these week by week
Soy sauce
Honey
Jam
Rice
Pasta
Stock cubes
Tinned tomatoes
Tins of beans
Tins of fruit
Frozen peas
Frozen veg (if you've space you can get peppers, onions, broccoli etc which totally prevents waste as you only use what you need)

I think what you're looking to do is overhaul both your spending & eating habits & you can 100% do this.

I recommend looking at Jamie Olivers book online on how to cook as it gives a basic recipe for lots of favourite dishes + ways to tweak them to use up leftovers. I think it's an excellent resource

Good luck op!