Frugal shopping

Just over 2 years ago we discussed our food bills as a large proportion of what would be our state pension. At that time I was working full time and my husband was at home having retired already. We were spending £85 per week. Our immediate challenge was to get that down! It also coincided with watching some of those "what's in your food" programmes and deciding we no longer wanted processed food and as soon as I retired it would be definitely be cooking from scratch.  Our first state in the strategy was  to record all spending and make sure we knew where and what the money was going on,

So first thing I did was to record food and house hold spending item by item. I did this for 3 months. Now I have a comprehensive list on a spreadsheet that I can sort and order and I have a good grasp of item price.  By the time I retired we were down to £70 per week for the two of us on average. Since we have retired to the country side we decided to only shop once a fortnight and we have to travel 12 miles to the supermarket at a cost of £5 to buy (as my husband observed) the same things each time!.  We are now using my list of shopping to buy on line and have the food delivered free (because it is over  £100).  Over the last 6 weeks the bill has dropped to £60 per week .Is this because those extra temptation buys don't happen?   Because the supermarket give you those nectar "points" which you can take as cash it has worked out that any minor top up shopping mid week (usually milk) has mostly been covered with the pay back!

Are we going to reduce this further?  Yes, we know £20 at least is vegetables! And we are working towards a full veg plot for next year! Will be writing about this at other times!

I will also be writing about other parts of our strategy in future.

Best wishes