I've been doing a lot of thinking about the basis of the frugality Martin and I practice and I've realised it all boils down to one thing: meal plans. That may sound overly simplistic, but in reality the way you plan and shop for food during the month determines whether you are in or out of control with your household budget.
If you go to the supermarket and buy a whole bunch of foodstuffs on impulse because you haven't done a meal plan, you'll find some of that food will end up the bin or becoming a science project in the back of the fridge. You won't have bought everything you need because Sod's Law says you'll forget half of it while wandering the aisles and you'll have to go back a couple of days later. At the same time, something else will catch your eye and into the basket it goes. Then two things suddenly become ten and you're down another £20. There may even come a time when you feel you spend your life visiting the supermarket and become thoroughly sick of the sight of the place.
Having a meal plan stops all this. I've got our meal planning to the point where we shop in bulk once a month and Martin tops up about once a week with milk, yoghurt and cream and the odd bit of seasonal fruit and veg that I don't grow.
This small amount of time spent planning has a number of major benefits:
- It saves me from having to wander the soul-destroying, advert-ridden aisles of a supermarket for hours a month.
- It helps me keep our household budget to a steady £120-£140 a month. This includes cat food, but not chicken food which we buy in bulk bags every few months.
- The price per 100g is much cheaper because I buy in bulk
- It evens out food price rises.
- I rarely run out of anything and have to emergency shop
- It allows me to take full advantage of special offers
- If anything ever happens to either of us, there'll be a stock of food to keep things functioning on automatic pilot for quite a while. The last thing you want to be doing in a crisis is spending appreciable amount of time or money shopping.
So, if you've never done meal planning before and want to have a go, this is how to go about it. By the way don't feel obliged to do a monthly one like I do. Start small and do a weekly one until you've been doing it a few months and feel comfortable scaling up. This plan makes an assumption that the supermarket is your main source of food shopping.
The basics
Step 1
What have you got in your cupboards, fridge and freezer? An inventory of what you have got to use up is the fundamental basis of a good menu plan.
Step 2
Write down all the favourite meals you eat and the main ingredients. This may seem a bind but you'll only have to do this once.
Step 3
Make a list or table plan of the breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for each day of your meal plan. You might want to do this on the computer rather than paper as you may have to change things around in the next step.
For example:
Sunday
Breakfast - pancakes with lemon and sugar, fresh fruit
Lunch - cheese on toast, fresh fruit
Dinner - spicy pasta with tuna and broccoli
Snacks - fresh fruit, flapjacks, dried fruit mix, yoghurt
Those meals that will use up oddments in the fridge, like half a jar of pasta sauce or some leftover rice, put in within the first couple of days of the plan otherwise they will go off and end up being thrown away.
Step 4
Now look at each meal and check the ingredients required against what you have in your inventory. Anything you need goes onto the shopping list. Don't forget to check things like condiments, sauces and snacks.
Step 5
Put the plan down for a bit and go make a cup of tea.
Step 6
Come back with tea and fresh eyes, then go through your list and make sure it doesn't generate waste and is realistic. For example, if you have a meal planned that uses 1/2 a bag of prepared salad, make sure you have plans to use the rest within a couple of days or you'll end up throwing it in the bin at the end of the week. Ditto half used cans and things like yoghurt, creme fraiche or cream. You might find you can freeze the excess ingredient straight away, but it's likely you will need to eat it the following day.
For example:
Sunday
Breakfast - pancakes with lemon and sugar, fresh fruit
Lunch - cheese on toast, fresh fruit
Dinner - spicy pasta with tuna and broccoli
Snacks - fresh fruit, flapjacks, dried fruit mix
Monday
Breakfast - toast and marmite
Lunch - Tuna sandwich, fresh fruit
Dinner - meatballs with tangy barbecue sauce, mash and mixed veg, fresh fruit and cream
Snacks - fresh fruit, flapjacks, dried fruit and nut mix
On Sunday you might use half a big jar of pasta sauce (if you don't make your own sauce from scratch) and half of a large can of tuna. The following day, the leftover sauce is used as a base for the meatball sauce while any tuna goes into a sandwich for lunch. Any left over cream from Monday's dessert could be used on Tuesday or Wednesday to make a carbonara sauce with some ham and mushrooms etc etc.
In terms of the realism factor, you may decide you're going to have a go at that extra complicated recipe with scores of ingredients and three hours of stove time one evening after work. But if you're too tired to cook fancy after work and just about manage to crawl into bed without a care assistant, forget it. The food will just sit there in the fridge and rot.
Step 7
So once you've rejigged your list of meals and your shopping list, it's time to think about household bits and pieces, such as shampoos and toilet rolls and headache pills, and any events you want to buy something for, like birthdays, Easter etc.
Step 8
Now it's time to shop. Clutching your list in your hand, hit the supermarket. Try and stick to the list unless there is an exceptional deal on and you know you will either eat the extra stuff or can freeze it until you know what you're going to do with it. This is a fine art and takes a lot of discipline. A bargain isn't a bargain if you didn't need it in the first place.
For example, Martin once came home with several boxes of Findus frozen crispy pancakes because he walked past them in the frozen section and they were on offer. For a start I hate them, so only one of us was able to eat them, and with Martin's appetite he was wolfing a box down in one go to get enough nutrition out of the tiny things, Even if they were 'cheap', they were expensive as a meal compared to anything I could have done and a hell of a lot less nutritious as well. They are also riddled with preservatives and food colourings. I suspect the reason they were cheap is because no else likes the horrible things and they were being sold off as loss leaders.
On the other hand, I very rarely buy those Mexican meal kits because I think they are horrendously expensive for what they are, but occasionally when they go on a 2 for 1 offer I'm in there stocking up for a few months.
Step 9
Pay for goods, get them home ASAP and store them properly. If you have bought cold food in bulk, make sure you have containers or bags to split it up into usable portions and freeze individually (if it can be frozen). There's no point buying pounds of mince for example if you end up having to take the whole lot out of the freezer just for a small amount, leaving you with loads of the stuff that can't be refrozen and has to be cooked within a couple of days.
Step 10
Now implement your meal plan. You can be flexible and switch around different meals, but try and bear in mind that some of your meals may have to go together on consecutive nights to avoid waste.
7 clever ways to make your household budget work harder
Once you've got the hang of the basics, it time to implement a few tricks to help save a few more pennies and make you a bit more of a savvy shopper.
1. Check out deals in advance and decide if they're worthwhile including them in your meal plan. There are a few deal comparison sites out there like
this one and
this one. This can be a good way to stock up on favourite foods cheaply.
2. Be careful with coupons from supermarket loyalty cards. They're not what they appear. For example, you might be offered a 30p saving if you buy a branded butter or pizza, but if you only ever use non-branded and there's a whacking great price difference even after taking account of the coupon, you'll end up spending more money than you would have ordinarily done. Do the math and don't be taken in by them. Coupon does not necessarily mean cheap.
3. If you get Tesco vouchers, don't redeem them for shopping. They are worth four times their face value in 'Deals" which include magazine subscriptions, days out and cinema tickets, all of which can be useful gifts.
4. The brand challenge. Make a point of trying food a brand below what you would normally buy. So if you buy from a supermarket's 'best' range, try the same item from the supermarket's own brand to see if there is any difference. Martin Lewis from moneysavingexpert.com believes most people can shave at least a third off their shopping by doing this regularly. You don't have to go overboard immediately and buy everything non-branded or value, but be prepared to give something a go every week. I think the only things I regularly buy branded now are Atora suet, Marmite and Nando's peri peri sauce.
5. Stop going to supermarkets for fruit and veg. Buy from markets and farms. One unfortunate by-product of supermarket shopping is it insulates us from the real cost of things. If I asked you how much a 1lb of potatoes was (or half a kilo if you want to go all metric on me), would you know what the average price is and whether the supermarket is more or less expensive than other sources? I can tell you now, you could buy the equivalent weight of potatoes from a farm or market much, much cheaper than a supermarket, but we've been conditioned into believing supermarkets are cheaper by constant TV advertising. And now all the prices are on the shelves, instead of on the food packaging, we have an even harder struggle to keep track of prices as we shop.
6. Bulk cook. There are two ways of doing this. One is to spend time cooking all your meals for a week in advance so you have less to do during the week. A popular method is to cook up a big batch of a base ingredient to which you can add extra ingredients to, such as a base red sauce that could have mince added for a bolognese or chilli, or cooked chicken or tuna for a pasta meal. The other way of doing it - and this tends to be the method I use - is to make a bigger batch of a meal and freeze the leftover portion. That way I save myself the time of cooking it (and therefore save money on the utilities as well) and make sure I don't end up with half eaten pots or cans of food in the fridge.
7. And finally, a little known tip: if your supermarket has a "foods of the world section' check that out before you buy any tinned or packet goods. I've found the same products much cheaper here, sometimes as much as half price. For example, coconut milk is now about £1.29 a can if you get it from its usual home in the Asian cooking section, but pop along a couple of aisles to 'foods of the world' and you'll find it for about 40p. Chickpeas are also cheaper.
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This has turned into a whacking great post, so I'll leave it there for now.
Do you have any interesting sneaky tricks you use to save money with your household budget?