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

That sounds a lot better than some of the crap that I read people eat.

But only if safe to do so

Several years ago I did a charity challenge to live off £1 per day for 14 days. It was miserable. I had to have porridge for breakfast every day. I don't really like porridge made with water. For lunch a slice of toast and an apple. For dinner beans on toast or a jacket potato or just 2 or 3 slices of toast. I bought a tiny bit of cheese that had a yellow sticker and grated that for a couple of days. I found some yellow sticker ham one day. That was the only meat I ate for the entire 14 days. I bought a packet of cream crackers as cheap if I got hungry. I had to buy tea bags and milk out of my money as part of the challenge meant you couldn't eat stuff from home you already had except seasoning. A group of us did it and we all said never again. I felt drained and tired most of the time. It's possible in the short term but not the medium or long term.

A Greggs pizza slice is £2.75 I think (I googled), so unless you plan on making it last nearly three days I don't think even that is an option.
I don't think £1 a day is possible.

DD at university reckons she is spending around £15 a week on food.

But ... that only includes supermarket food, not "eating out" food (which is a meal deal from a supermarket or a share of takeaway pizza) at least once a week.

And ... she is short and petite and doesn't eat much

And ... we did stock her up with a lot of basics (pasta, rice, basic herbs and spices etc) at the start of term

I thought she was doing well to keep her food bills so low. i think £30 is totally unrealistic.

When I was a student, I managed on about £10 a week. That was in 2015 though and with heavy reliance on Olio app. Vegetarian meals and 100% cooking from scratch. No eating out, even in Gregg’s. Most meals were a stew of some kind. I could normally manage 5 days or so out of a large pot.
If you have to, you probably can. If you don’t absolutely need to, then I don’t see much point in being so restrictive.

Can you breakdown how you spent your £2 per day and what you ate?

It's do-able, but you won't enjoy it or get the nutrients you need for your health. Why not instead aim for a realistic budget for a healthy diet?

Do you want malnutrition? Completely impossible. Even £30 a week is pushing it when it comes to including protein and five a day. No.

There’s a few YouTubers that have done this and someone wrote a book (year of living frugally or something).

I think it’s a good way to reset or save for a particular goal.

OP - what planet are you on?
Like have you been transformed back to the 90s or something?

I also think it is in bad taste to post a thread wallowing in cosy pretend frugality when you have the luxury of knowing you can spend whatever you want all the time.

No, it's impossible & very stupid unless you are in an absolutely dire circumstances. If that's the case there are food banks, benefits & other lifelines depending on where you live.

This sounds like some of the talk that went on when I was in an eating disorders unit recovering from anorexia to be honest.

I think you might just about be able to do it for one month, if in dire straits. But it would be very boring, and probably put you at risk of deficiencies - I don't think you could have a balanced diet on that.

When I was a student I could manage £10 a week, but that was 15 years ago - I reckon food's probably doubled in price since then.

No - no fully stocked cupboard

Oh wait edited bc I just read the second ‘no’. I’d be intrigued to see how you get on then, £30 a week for me as a single person is just about doable, WITH a partially stocked cupboard.

I’d be concerned that you have an eating disorder tbh if you think £30 a month is sufficient

So you've spent £35/ your entire budget in 2/3 of the time ... You still have 12 days to go...

I read a book by a woman who lived on a pound a day for a year, but that was back in the early 2000s. Inflation, particularly on basic foods, would mean the equivalent now would be more like £2 a day. And I seem to remember she did things like going to events where she knew there would be free food, grew some stuff herself, had some meals with family etc as well as all the expected buying in bulk or whatever was yellow-stickered and cheap at the supermarket.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Lived-Year-Just-Pound/dp/1906593124

😂

Surely a more useful exercise to do would be something along the lines of " Can I eat a healthy diet for £20 a week" including your 5-a-day plus enough protein, fat and fibre.

Do you have a history of disordered eating?

A pizza slice from Greggs is about £2.50 ...

I don't think this would be manageable at all. Certainly not if you actually prioritised nutritionally balanced meals to ensure you were getting everything you needed.

£30 a week - yes
£30 a month - not a chance unless you relied heavily on others subsidising your meals/cooking for you

Maybe you could give all the money you've saved to a food bank?

Even the pound bakery is more than a pound these days ,how many times a day are you planning on eating ?

@Jumell playing at being poor and starting a thread about it, is the height of bad taste.
If you need to brag about it, to appreciate it!
Then you really need to have a think about
" why you need to play at being poor "
To appreciate things!
It's a fucking batshit mindset

Christ no I spend 70 a week on food and drinj that's just me so no 30 a month is not doable