£250 a week on shipping. Is this nuts?

[Twobigsapphires]

The jury seems to be out amongst people I’ve spoken to (not many, basically my family). We are essentially now spending around £250 a week on the food shop (one main shop a week and one top up). Household consists of my and Dh, ds20, dd18 and ds16. Often ds1 gf will stay for dinner on a Sunday and one or two nights in the week. We have 2 dogs but Dh pays for their food separately.

shop covers park lunches for Dh and I plus ds1 and ds2. Dd I give an allowance too and she pays for lunch out of that. Also covers a couple of bottles a wine a week and household cleaning products and most essential toiletries (shower gel etc).

Dh thinks this is excessive, I think at £50 pp per week this is what it is. My dm said I should be aiming for £150 per week! Dsis says she spends around £150 per week on her food shop for her, Dh and two small dc (doesn’t include dinner money and her Dh buys lunch out each day).

what does the mums net verdict think?

@PinkyU - normal food here. Nothing fancy, no alcohol. We buy unprocessed where possible, make almost everything from scratch.

Spending similar here for 5 adults and a cat.

Including some wine and toiletries etc
Could probably reduce it if I bought cheaper brands and cheaper meat but I don't really want to.

That’s a huge amount. We spend £80 a week. I wouldn’t be providing all snacks, drinks etc for the older two. They need to fund that themselves.

2 adults 1 child in my house.

Monthly big shop around £70/80 then when home I separate the meat/sausages etc into dinner portions and frozen.

Then we only spent probably about another £50 for bread/milk/fresh products as required.

My son gets free school meals (Scotland up to p5) so just snacks are bought for him.

£250 is a quarter of my monthly income that would cripple me.

Or maybe that’s all we can afford to spend so we have to make it work.

You do know some people have single (average) wage income households and can’t afford 1k a month on food, right?

£100 isn't a top up. That's another shop

What are you buying in the top up

It sounds about right to me, we spend upto about £800 a month for 2adults and 2dc (4&7) - 3 aldi shops usually decreasing in cost across the month 180, 160, 140 one B&M shop for branded items approx £100 and a couple of top ups mainly bread, berries,milk, mushrooms and other small ingredients for a meal like sour cream

It’s only unreasonable if you can’t afford it! We’re a 4 adult household (with a 5th 80% of the time) and we’re creeping towards £180/200 a week now. We eat good quality food, and don’t do ready meals or takeaways. I try not to stress too much as we’re in the fortunate position that we can afford it, but 2 years ago for 3 adults I was spent doing 90-100 a week 🤯

I ship 90% Aldi, and that doesn’t include booze

My aunt has just said to me that teenagers are like cats. If they don't get enough calories they sleep all day.

You really expect an 18 year old to provide all snacks for themselves? She’s doing her A levels and in full time education. I give her lunch money but she does have a part time job and I’m sure she buys snacks etc with that when she’s out and about (coffee shop trips etc) but whilst she’s at home should I not be providing her with good balanced meals? I don’t buy a lot of rubbish, they each go through maybe one bag of crisps or two a week, the odd cereal bar or biscuit. Mainly snacks might be fruit, yoghurts, cheese and crackers, bit of toast, pit noodle, flapjack etc.
As for eldest ds, he spends most weekends at his gf and I’m sure he spends a lot of his wages on grabbing food on the go etc but when he’s at home I’ll stock food he eats.

Thank you, that’s what I thought. It sounds a lot, I mean, it is a lot, but not if you break it down. To cost per meal per person. I’m aware I could cut it down further, but we don’t really need to and I’m 100% sure this is just a phase of having three strapping teenagers in the house.

I don't think that's unreasonable at all.

We are a family of 6, two adults 3 children and one cat. Yes, our cat is family!
I am disabled so get PIP, not able to work. Our youngest gets DLA, and this gets spent on her and what she needs (and anything we don't use goes into her savings).
My OH works full time and we do get some UC.

We rent, OH pays this. I pay the council tax, water, and Virgin Media. We split the gas & electric.
Shopping we also split, and I do sometimes have to vary it depending on what's available where. Due to my disability and OH not driving, we're reliant on shopping online.
Dd2 needs a very regimented food diet as her ASD doesn't tolerate change. She must have Billy Bear and not any substitute, she can tell. We must get her strawberries and she gets through a punnet in two days. This is where her DLA definitely is appreciated.
Roughly we spend around £150-£200 a week on our shopping, and then I will do a big shop once a month so one of the weeks it will go up to about £300. This then covers things like toiletries, laundry stuff, cat food & litter, frozen and non perishables.

It certainly depends on budget, I wouldn't spend that if we couldn't afford it and I wouldn't get the little treats every week that I do for us all. I do stick pennies into savings accounts and they add up very quickly, I like my bank account to have whole £ balances!

It will definitely go down as your teenagers leave home! I had three teenagers ( only 4 years between eldest and youngest) so it was like feeding an army! I was a single mum, working as a teacher and got home after the kids so they rooted around for food as soon as they got home from school. I kept all the decent snacks in my car to ration them, would give them something extra like a yogurt, chocolate bar, crisps etc for supper once I knew they had eaten a home cooked meal. Otherwise, it would all disappear and there would be arguments about who had the most!

I made sure there was always plenty of bread, butter and jam so they could make as much toast as they wanted and maybe cheap ham or cheese for sandwiches. They only ate fruit if I cut it up and served it with yogurt or cream for dessert so that was safe to leave in the house. When I was running out of time or too tired, I would make a plain sponge cake mix in the microwave and serve it with syrup, fruit purée ( from fruit that was going off a bit) and lots of custard! That filled up any cracks but within an hour or two they were hunting for more food!

I do think it's alot, but that's just my opinion. I definitely wouldn't call £100 shop at Aldi a top up though. You say you don't buy alot of snacks, but d you buy branded items, they are very expensive.

We are a family of 4. Eldest child eats more than me. Homecooked meals from scratch 99% of the time. Our meat is purchased from the butcher and all other shopping done at Aldi. Our budget is £500 a month and last month we had left over.

We could spend more, we could spend less. We enjoy our food and also enjoy having money to spend elsewhere. All about balance. If you are happy spending £12k+ a year on food, then carry on and ignore everyone else.

This thread is giving me the fear - am about to leave the former marital home and will have 50/50 custody of my two teen boys, the grocery budget is tight at £250 per month not week. I've lost track the last year or so on how much we currently spend on groceries as big shops have been replaced by bitty shopping by me and stbexh but the vast majority of my shopping is in Lidl so will be interesting to see how we get on.

Think £200-200 is reasonable, especially if you're buying decent bottles of wine. Think you'll struggle to get it any lower, especially as you're already shopping around. I have found Asda to be cheaper than Tesco on quite a few products, but it's a more pleasant shopping experience at Tesco. If you can afford it, what the issue?

I spend, on average, £50 per week, per person, so I would say that's perfectly normal and reasonable.

However I buy what I like and don't try to cut back. If I was trying to be frugal then I could probably cut it down a bit.

We're spending similar for 4 adults (3 male) with assorted food restrictions, so GF and lactose free for me, lactose free for DS2 who also does eat that beige diet (severely autistic) so we buy him good quality meat and fish.

I've tried to cut it down a bit but then realise that it's me with the extra work and the £1 tomatoes taste of nothing and go uneaten so get wasted. DH does take tinned soup to the office but it's the stuff with lots of beans or lentils in that is actually filling. DH and I eat lots of pulses and we tend eat chicken thigh rather than breast and so on but even those aren't that cheap any more, even if you don't buy them free range.

We probably spend around £150-200 per week for a family of 2 adults one DS17. DS is like a bottomless pit and making sure we have lots of food he likes at home and giving him money for meal deals saves on the cost of school meals which are utterly ridiculous.

DH says we're not throwing any food out, and we can afford it so its ok. It's also a bit of a shock as prices have gone up so much over the past 1-2 years, our main shop used to hover around £90-100, now it's usually £130-150.

I'm hoping it will go down significantly when he goes to uni.

Oh and also DH and I bring our own food and coffee into the office when working so we're not spending £10 per day on that.

A lot of people don't realise how much growing kids/teenagers eat! And some people just have much bigger appetites. My husband is lean and tall, and his metabolism is insane - he never puts on an oz of weight but he needs a lot of fuel (does a manual job too).

My kids are turning out the same way and I dread to hink how much the food shop will be for them when they're the age of yours OP!

We currently all have packed lunches (one of the kids has school meals two days p/w but I'm ok with that) and it's a bit of a challenge to balance economy with taste, calorific needs, avoiding UHP stuff etc but OK so far. They've both had a lot of cherry toms on their lunches this summer as that's what the garden was providing 😁 I also bake weekly and freeze cakes in slices for packed lunches, as multipacks of Soreen/muffins/cereal bars etc soon add up. I'm also not above decanting some crisps/tortilla chips into a small bag/tub for their lunches, same with raisins/apricots etc - my friend was horrified that I wasn't just buying multipacks but hey ho.

£50 per week per person does sound a lot. My DD managed well on £30 a week at uni.

£30 a week is £4.29 a day. Can you please tell me what you could eat for that?

EU here food for 2 adults...3 meals daily, snacks extra only for weekend, the once weekly grocery shop is 125 euro. When DD visit in summer from overseas was 155 euro each week.