economy shopping for family of 5

[misshardbroom]

About a year or so ago I posted on MN about how super I was at economising and how cheap my weekly shop was, etc etc.

Well, how smug was I? Somehow the cost of the shopping has crept up and up and now it's regularly costing me £85 a week before any of the extra bits you remember you've forgotten and pop to the shop for.

There's me, DH, DD(6), DS1(5) and DS2(3). DH & the older DCs take packed lunches every day, and DS2 has a packed lunch at nursery twice a week.

I meal plan one week at a time. I do the shopping through mysupermarket.com so I can check the cheapest place, and oddly, Sainsbury's does always come out as my cheapest option (not sure how).

We do eat meat, but not every day. I tend to cook from scratch, so there's not loads of ready made stuff.

So how is it so expensive? Is this just a fact of life that I can't feed a family of 5 for less than this? Getting seriously worried now that VAT is going back up.

I 've been looking in topics under "money matters" and "credit crunch", there's a lot of stuff there on how people manage, and lots of good ideas and advice. HTH.

I agree that it's a fact of life, unless you are willing to eat economy ranges all the time, which I am not. We buy virtually no meat as 75% of us are veggie but it's routinely about 70-80 squid a week. However, I do always buy 'good' cheese, coffee, Earl grey and loo roll, so I guess that pushes it up.

That's a relief (especially to hear this from Janeite who I know is extra-specially good at this sort of thing!). Even though it doesn't help my pocket, it's a relief to know other people are in a similar position.

I find myself stuck between a rock & a hard place as well... do I insist on buying seasonal apples & pears because they're cheaper and benefit my bank balance, even though my children won't eat them? Or do I buy expensive out of season soft fruit because it's the only way I edge them anywhere near their 5-a-day?

We are a family of four - DS's are 12.6 and 10.

I do buy some basic ranges - pasta, tinned toms, flour.

We do eat a lot of meat, but I do cook from scratch, do all my own baking, don't buy loads of biscuits etc and my bill is still sky high - probably averages around £130 a week, so I actually think you do quite well.

Misshardbroom - believe me, other than eating lots of lentils and chickpeas, I'm pretty dreadful!

I love fruit, in fact we all do and spend quite a bit of money on it.

I think our bread is £1.24 a loaf, but I have made my own.

Ours has gone up too
Same things just more expensive.

Oh - Sainsbo's have been doing three bags of frozen berries for a fiver for ages now. We buy those as they last well and you can use them in smoothies, on cereal, in hot puddings etc.

I really think prices have increased as I used to be very frugal and cook everything from scratch eat really well with a lot of organic tbh and I did that in 2007/8 for about £50 for 3 adults and 2 cats plus at least one 'friends over for dinner'each week.Now it is more like 80 and less socialising! I am going to start again as I want to buy a caravan and need to fund it.Virtually no meat lots of pulses BOGOF on things like squash coffee washing powder etc which for some reason bug me when they run out

I've noticed prices have gone up alot this year. We spend a fortune on fruit and veg, quite a bit on meat and make savings where we can e.g. stock up on deals, have baked potatoes, pasta, soup quite often

There are four of us dcs, 3.5 and 11 months, almost everything we eat is from scratch and we spend ?150 a week, including toiletries, a bottle of wine, cleaning stuff. A helluva lot of money and we certainly don't buy premium brands...