End of the Feb £100 shopping challenge

Thank you for the kind comments on the sourdough tutorial.  I should just mention that if you do decide to try making your own sourdoughs, don't expect your first few loaves to have that distinctive sourdough tang.  That comes with age - the age of your starter, that is, not your age!  The longer you have your starter, the more your loaves will acquire the tang.  

My last weekly shop I did mostly in Lidl, going into Morrisons as well to pick up a few things I couldn't get from Lidl.  I spent £19.47 in Lidl, £6.60 in Morrisons, bringing the total spend for February to £103.91, which I'm very pleased with.  It's worked so well, we're going to continue it for this month - next month might be a bit harder though, as we run down the freezer and larder contents.

I found it quite easy to stick to my budget (other than the tiny overspend), but there are several reasons why we could manage to spend only that much:-

1.  We started off with a very well stocked freezer and larder - they were very nearly full, actually.  So I planned meals based around what we already had in, rather than just going to the shop out of habit and buying haphazardly, just because we fancied something.

2.  I did a freezer and larder inventory, followed by a week's menu plan based on food we had in and then a shopping list to add on things to complete the meals, every week.  Every single week, without fail.  I think this is the single most important thing to do to cut your food spending.

3.  If we ran out of something, because of an oversight on my part (or husband using the last of something and not telling me!), then we improvised or went without.  It didn't kill us.  

4.  Following on from No. 3....normally in the past, if we were out of or running low on something (milk or eggs or cheese, usually), we'd go to the shop to get more, and end up buying other things as well, just because we were there.  So another big thing to cut our spending is...not to go to the shops!  It's so obvious when you think about it, isn't it.  This time, when we were getting short of milk, I just used a carton of long life milk, which we always have in - I keep them for emergencies but don't tend to use them often as husband doesn't like  the taste of it in hot drinks.  So I used it for making a sauce and kept the remaining fresh milk for drinks, so avoided going to the shop until our planned shopping day two days later.

5.  At the start of the month, I took out £100 cash for the shopping and kept it in a separate purse, using only this cash for shopping and sticking to my shopping list, although I did buy a few extras of things that I knew we would be using within the month and which happened to be on special offer.  Having a limited amount of cash in your purse and telling yourself that this is all that's available concentrates the mind wonderfully.

It just shows that we can stick to a much reduced food budget, by planning meticulously and being disciplined...all the time.  Hard work, but doable.  We want to save up for a couple of things, as well as trying to get our emergency savings fund up again following the hugely expensive car repairs last year, so I will continue to budget carefully for food shopping every month.