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

No WITHIN.

just wanted to CLARIFY ALL I had in before 12th nov was instant coffee and few tea bags - if I’m being pedantic salt n vinegar ! That’s all !!

OP I think you’ve got a bigger problem than trying to get your food budget down.

Here you go 20 plus pages.
Might find something healthy in there

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4548020-to-ask-what-you-can-actually-cook-for-30pmeal?page=1

We probably spend that per day

Exactly and the ready made tuna and pasta ,
Instead of buying a packet of dried pasta and the cheapest tins of tuna.

No one’s feeding me in the low - it’s my first month of seriously budgeting so I’m learning by trial and error and will budget more effectively next month.

its not uncommon to skip meals - although admittedly not ideal

Wtf?

What are you putting the cheese slices on? Mince pies?

And ready shelled eggs???? Words fail me tbh.

At least buy big bags of oats, pasta and lentils if you’re going to do this.

I mean you could just about survive if you eat ramen or have a cheeseburger a day as your "eating out"? £30 a week is more like it.

I feel this is in poor taste, as I have lived in food poverty, for many years. To pretend at it just because you think that will give you an insight is poorly judged. If you haven't lived it, you will never understand it. If you want to feel more gratitude for things you have in life, that is fine, you don't need to pretend to be worse off than you are to do so. If you want to change your approach to food shopping/cooking to improve your health, that is also fine but, again, you don't need to pretent to be poor to do so. Do what most families in the 80s and before that did - plan your meals for the next week/month, only buy what you need and cook it all yourself. (Be grateful that you can afford the gas/electricity necessary to cook your meals.)

It is highly likely that anyone really in these straights may be able to feed themselves, but wouldn't be getting the necessary calories, nutrients or minerals their body needs. They'd probably be skipping meals, portion sizes will be very small; there would be no 'treats' or eating out at all; and they would be looking to supplement their food source any way they could - extra work, food banks, free meals offered by churches/community centres, taking the leftovers from work meetings home, looking for edible food others have thrown away in the bin/at the end of a market day etc. It's a hard way to survive.

The list of food you have bought is bizarre. No one living day after day in food poverty is wasting their money on Greggs, pringles or packets of biscuits. Nor is it the way to go about improving your health/losing weight.

Yes fair point you’re making .. I admit

I have a well-stocked cupboard, good access to Olio in London and could stand with losing weight, so I suppose I could for one month. In fact maybe it's not a bad idea 🤔

On the off-chance that you're not on a wind up mission, you really do need to seek help for your disordered eating.

You'll get seriously ill from eating like that.

Then stop eating crap

Sugar will just turn to fat and you will crave more because you are not feeding your body the nutrients it needs so it hungers for vitamins and minerals and you keep feeding it carbs and sugar
Your body is a machine. In order for it not to break down you need to put in it what it needs to function

That food list is awful- all processed food carbs, junk and sugar.
You are living on crap. No vegetables, no protein.
Also why buy cheese slices when you can buy a block of cheese?
Why buy Greggs pizza rather than a whole supermarket pizza and bring from home
Why not buy eggs and boil them yourself
Cheap balanced food!
Baked potatoes (make yourself)
Lentils
Tinned tomatoes
Tinned fish
basic fresh vegetables like onions, carrots
Look at frozen veg like spinach, peas
Get some mince and batch cook bolognese or chilli
Make some vegetable soups

So you spent £35 on snacks.

Why not do intermittent fasting while you're at it. That would make your snacks last a month. 🙄

I think it would be pretty tough. Just googled some prices (sainsburys) and if you bought the following:
Whole Chicken - £4
potatoes = 1.35
carrots = 60p
Onions - 85p a kilo
Basics bag of pasta = 50p
a tin of economy chopped tomatoes - 40p
1kg rice - 55p
2 tins of beans = 54p (27 ea)
bag of porridge oats - 90p
Cheapest white bread - 47p

That comes to not much more than a tenner.

From that id make:
Porridge for breakfast with water
Roast dinner two days with carrots and spuds, leftover sliced chicken on sandwiches. (whole chicken would do loads for 1 person)
Tomato pasta for two days using some onion and chopped carrots for flavour.
Rice with a bit of chicken onion and carrots 1 day.
2 days of jacket potato with baked beans.
You wouldnt starve to death but it'd be really, really boring.

I had an ED in my teens/early 20s and I thought the same
But mn seems to have a lot of people with ED , I stay away from the what have you eaten in a day because I don't want to get drawn into that again

There is no way I’ll do this next month

I dunno if you ask '30p Lee' about it you could probably make it work for that budget. He seems to think that you can.

Look op, I'm not having a go but I'm really concerned about you.
Do you have parents or family around that have shown you how to cook or meal plan at all?
Your shopping list reminds me of when I left foster care and had no idea how to plan and budget properly with the £50pw I was given, although I didn't buy biscuits and cakes my first shop was nothing I could make proper meals from, it was ridiculous tbh 😅

After living off a jar of peanut butter and a pack of pasta I was fed up of myself and went to the local library and wrote out recipes and meals from cook books and asked a neighbour to show me how to cook eggs etc.

You have so many more resources than I did back then, look up on YouTube how to cook or meal plan and there's a varity of videos showing you how.

Invest some time into this, learn how to provide yourself nutritious meals/snacks, even 30 mins a day, set yourself a goal, write out a weekly menu, create a little routine that suits and you can eat healthy on a budget ( hopefully more than £30 a month ) and lose weight if you want to.

Yes but you haven’t given the example menu?

OK I see you did later provide a list of somethings but none of this makes sense. As pp said this is unnecessary and unhealthy and not a good thing to try out.

So yes YABU.

OP you are clearly bonkers 😂

However I'm going to humour you and suggest you have a look on YouTube, plenty of people have done this challenge and produced actual meals instead.

Here's one for

You make good points

I admit I bought a lot of items for the huge Nectar bonus points - would explain the cheese

So for 3 weeks you ate some biscuits, crisps and milk?
If that is the case, I can give some ideas about further savings for you. Like, I dunno, boiling eggs instead of buying pre-boiled....
If I didn't think your post was inflammatory before, I certainly think so now.

I always wondered how 30p Lee was so called ! I honestly didn’t know !