Reducing Shopping Bills

jam tarts and pie

This blog post isn’t to gloat, but just a realisation of how far my better half and I have come with reducing our shopping bills.

jam tarts and pie

We had a food delivery the other day and along with the list of items we brought, stapled to the back was a list of someone else’s items. I decided to be nosey and compare the two. Comparing the lists many things become apparent. Firstly their shopping was for one person, unlike ours being for two.

With that in mind here are some details:

– Our shopping was £16.93 GBP less.

– We had four more fruit or veg only items.

– We had twenty-five more items which were classed as ‘value’.

– We had six less items which had dairy in them.

– We had no non-supermarket named brands, they had thirty-one.

Our food bills used to be high, easily done especially when very busy and pressures in life. If we had doubled their bill for two people, then ours would have been £33.86 less. I think the big differences are we are vegetarian and try to avoid named brands. Plus we avoid items which are expensive if we enjoy an alternative. Sometimes we have an alternative which we don’t hate, but don’t love either, but have here and there to keep our food budget in check.

It would be fair to say we struggle to keep our food bill at the level we do. There are some ‘value’ items which I probably wouldn’t eat, but many I really like i.e. iceberg lettuce, plum tomatoes and some which I don’t mind, but won’t rave about. However we’ve been spending that money elsewhere, such as home improvement and clothes recently.

Like this week I put tortillas on the shopping list, only to take them off to keep in budget. We didn’t need to keep in budget, but seeing as eight other items looked pretty darn good, it didn’t matter. Plus I eat a lot of home-made food, such as in the last week home-made scones and a pear and plum crumble.

If I didn’t have my better half, I’m sure I would be eating incredibly badly with high bills to accompany. For a vegetarian I didn’t used to eat a lot of salad, now I do most days. I’ve not drunk alcohol in around four months, whereas in the past I drunk far too much. I used to eat a lot of chocolate bars, drink a lot of cherry coke, when not boozing or eating chips or expensive extra mature cheddar (not on offer). Things have changed so much over the years.

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