Like a lot of people we are totally broke at the minute and having to cut back on all our spending. I?ve been reducing my spending on food and groceries gradually over the last year or so, and I think I?m at my rock bottom costs now ? for main meals for a month I can feed my family (3 adults, 2 toddlers) for £90 a month. I know a lot of you are in similar financial difficulties, so thought it might be useful to share this with you to help if you are making cutbacks in your food spending also.
This total does involve shopping in 2 different stores (when I compared prices Tesco were better in some things, ASDA in others, so I shop in both now). I did the ?downshift a brand? challenge and like MSE advises I only take the value brand of food when I didn?t really notice a difference in taste ? we still use some branded items, so it may be possible for you to go even cheaper than this, although most of our food is either supermarket own-brand or the value range. I also haven?t taken any special offer or stickered deals into account so this will help as well to cut costs further, and if you only have 2 adults in your house instead of our 3 it should end up less. However I have worked out my quantities so nothing is going to waste, which may involve batch cooking or buying larger packets of meat and then freezing half ? it may mean sometimes my grocery bill is higher if I am buying (for example) a 3kg packet of pasta, but then I?ll not have to buy pasta the next month, so it works out on average.
This is only for main meals, I reckon if I add in breakfast, lunches, cleaning products, loo roll and a few small extras my bill will increase to £200 a month, but still not bad as I used to spend more than twice that every month.