General expense

I feed myself for about £10 a week, and I eat quite a lot, that’s with sainsbury basics stuff thats half decent, plus some normal sainsburys stuff and some real brands!

Just as well that’s all it costs to eat as rent + utilities + car is getting very expensive!

£450 a month for 2 adults and 2 kids.

Menus planned, no waste, not much booze.

Our bills have gone up by about 10% this year despite one of the kids coming out of nappies.

I feed myself for about £10 a week, and I eat quite a lot

This is getting silly now, how can you possibly do that on under thirty bob a day?

It amazes me how cheap most stuff is.

Compared to the 80s…

Booze costs no more, or possibly less.

Electronic stuff is almost free.

White goods are similar.

Cars aren’t much more.

Car parts are similar.

Labour is insanely expensive. Not a problem if you DIY of course.

Fuel and power are the main things that are blatantly, insanely more expensive.

£30-£40 a week to feed a family of 5. I have my own chickens and grow my own salad and veggies. One thing that does help is a bit of searching to see which supermarkets have what offers on like the buy one get one frees and ONLY buy what you need. other than that i shop in Lidl and Aldi quality is a lot better and less crap in the food.

This is getting silly now, how can you possibly do that on under thirty bob a day?

No idea what becky_kirk43 eats but I could do it, or get very close. Look at pasta, cheap cuts of meat, rice, unidentifiable frozen fish… you could eat healthily for around £10 a week easily enough.

yup, mrsconsequence lived on less than 10pound per week for food and drink for 3 years at uni.

Yep – pasta and rice are very cheap – combine with mince and various vegetables are you can eat very cheaply.

Doesn’t seem to have done me any harm for the last year and a bit so I assume I get enough nutrients!

Doesn’t seem to have done me any harm for the last year and a bit so I assume I get enough nutrients!

Far better than spending 10x as much on processed crap. In fact you can’t do much better.

We cook everything at home, but the food bill still comes up to some 100 Euro for 2+1.
The car? Ooops, another 100 Euro per week, without it the missus would be spending another 2 hrs daily commuting for the total saving of 50 Euro weekly but I would be unable to see my clients – no viable public transport so we’d be losing another 100 Euro per week.
The food is affordable but we shop at Aldi, Lidl, local shops, Dunnes, Sainsbury’s, wherever the particular things are cheapest. Luckily most shops are within a mile from home.
It was actually cheaper to do the internet shopping at Sainsbury’s when we lived in UK as we bought no spur-of-the-moment items.
BTW I haven’t been to a pub for months, not keen on 4.50 per pint. The bottle of Bells lasted me a month too.
One of the reasons I’m sort of considering moving out of town is being able to grow veggies. My wife has stopped eating meat a month ago, lost some weight that was unwanted, looks and feels much better. I have access to cheap and very decent beef, no worries there.

£7 for a kebab in Geneva – so I’m told….

Still find it hard to believe you can feed yourself for a tenner a week, two pints of milk is about a quid and the lettuce I get for my kids giant snails is sixty pence a throw

Blimey costs me about a tenner to feed the fish and moggy, mince and pasta ain’t that cheap, even liver is about thirty bob a pound.

You could start with escargot for breakfast, fish for lunch, curried, err, meat for dinner. And you could have a nice fur hat.

I think about £10 a day each, £20 a day for a couple is what we assume is the cost for food on average (no booze).

Work on probably £100 a week on food and drink at the supermarket and same again on eating out. Sometimes more, sometimes less depending on the week.

Petrol / Diesel is till relatively cheap for how far you can travel for so little. Gas and Electricity is where the huge changes and squeezes have come for people.

The assess milk I bathe in costs me £250 per bath.

I have to pay it though, as it’s my favourite time of the day.

You could start with escargot for breakfast, fish for lunch, curried, err, meat for dinner. And you could have a nice fur hat

Very good 🙂

You had better not let my daughter hear you talk like that, poor old moggy has already lost one leg in a road accident

What was done on the car for £200?

Back in the day people used to learn skills to fix/mend stuff or renovate the house etc. Problem is people are all to happy to pay mechanics/tradesmen to do stuff these days.

Very good

You had better not let my daughter hear you talk like that, poor old moggy has already lost one leg in a road accident

Our dog costs more just in snacks than becky pays for food 😆

But when the apocalypse comes he’ll be in the stew. After we run out of neighbours…

The assess milk I bathe in costs me £250 per bath.

What do you need to assess it for?

Mrs Grips spent some time in France not being paid by her job in 2003. She apparently survived on 2 € a week. Sounds impossible…

yup, mrsconsequence lived on less than 10pound per week for food and drink for 3 years at uni.

i did that living in africa for 3 months in africa – the last month was mostly eating out though as we found somewhere i deemed fit to eat 😀

It wouldn’t be the first time that people invent something to justify their position or view, would it?

Nope. And nor will it be the last.

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Oh, and FWIW it’s rare we go over £50 a week at the supermarket between the 2 of us, and that includes beer and cleaning products……

We can make dinner for £2 a head, easy.

But I do have steaks that cost £6 from the butchers from time to time 🙂

trail_rat… it helps that she’s not a drinker, so that 10pounds went entirely on food 99% of the time. 🙂

This is heading the way of the Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch

Fair enough making dinner for two quid, but not a whole weeks worth of meals for a tenner

I reckon on about £10 a week fruit and veg and perhaps £10-£20 per month for store cupboard items
I suspect I eat far healthier than most on here but make almost everything I eat from fresh ingredients. I eat lots of fruit and fruit smoothies if I cut them out I suspect I could get nearer £1 a day as fruit is the biggest hit tbh.
I dont eat meat so I assume that helps pulses are not dear either.
Oh I might see what i could eat for £5 a week next week.

I pay 1.4% of my take-home in food costs for a family of 4. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Nothing processed gets bought – always cook from scratch – and this doesn’t include meals out, not that there are many of those.

i was limited in eg by lack of stuff i could eat …

olives (very cheap at 30-50p a pouch) , pasta , tinned tuna , tinned tomatoes , local bread , fresh fish and a bunch of spices i took with me – theres only so much you can eat !

one of the lads made us spam curry one night – didnt thank him for that – i dont make a habit of eating spam at home i aint gonna start in WA.

back here we spend 50 quid for 2 on average – some weeks more some weeks less

We spend about £50-60 a week for two of us doing a big shop once a week at asda with all our meals for the week planned out. We cook nearly everything from scratch too.

I dont think I can quite believe people can live on under £10 a week. Ceareal, milk and juice for breakfast and sandwiches and fruit for lunch and youre already pushing £10 and thats without even eating any evening meals or snacks!

I pay 1.4% of my take-home in food costs for a family of 4

Suggesting that you’re earning a fair wedge and are probably a bit of a miser too.

Or you’re not very good at maths 😉

Edit: Quick calc says that if you’re only spending £200 a month then your salary is in excess of £250k.

there’s absolutely no reason to lie about mrsconsequence spending 10pound a week or less on food at uni… so why aren’t people believing it? maybe her portions are smaller than yours? maybe she bought pasta and potatos/veg in bulk so it would last and cost less on average, maybe she didnt eat snacks.. just breakfast, lunch and dinner. maybe she didnt drink fruit juices but was happy with weak diluted squash… maybe she was/is perfectly happy with the supermarket value range of food products.

hang on… there’s no maybe, just fact. 😀

when you dont drink hot drinks, alcohol, buy expensive fruits, meat, weird vegetables and such… coupled with a determination to eat within a certain budget and accepting that will mean a limited choice of food/meals….you’d be surprised how cheap you can eat for.

there’s absolutely no reason to lie about mrsconsequence spending 10pound a week

When was that, she could have been at uni years ago and my quote was from Becky anyway

Of course you could be a fruitarian, but I presume we are talking about someone eating the conventional breakfast,lunch and tea.
So far today I have had some sugar puffs with milk,glass of juice and several cups of tea.
Milk was a quid for two pints, cereal £1.50 a box (third off in sainsburys ) and waitrose essential grapefruit juice at about £1.80 a carton
Not exactly excessive, but that tenner won’t last long and forgot the tea bags/milk for the cuppas

finished uni 2 or 3 years ago.

finished uni 2 or 3 years ago

Well thats at least another fiver at todays prices then regardless of what the official inflation figure is

you probably can eat for less than £10 a week, but why would you want to?
2 decent steaks cost nearly that.

maybe so TT… but i get the feeling if i had said she lived on 10 a week for food (15 by todays prices) there’d still be people finking i’m making it up! its all she could afford and she survived making 3 meals a day out of it ensuring to have both meat and vegetables each day.

agreed mr smith… you can, but i definitely wouldn’t want to!

you probably can eat for less than £10 a week, but why would you want to?

Sometimes you can’t afford more, ever considered this?

£10 a week at todays prices – no chance, unless you wait until the supermarket is closing every night to get the massive savings or live off boiled rice and water.

Excel spreadsheet on its way 😉
Breakfast Porridge – 50 p per week?? dont use milk do use fruit hate it but good for you. Aldi cereal perhaps £1
Dinner usually humus or lentil type pate or refried beans[ home made] with salad on pitta [ home made] and usually a banana – £3 a week? munch on seeds/nuts and fruit pieces [ about £5 a month for that]
tea mixed veg soup with broth mix [£2-3 for 8 days worth], pasta, curry or stir fry or perhaps a chippy tea or hot pot with veggie sausages peas and pickled beetroot

I am going for fiver next week. 😯
Porridge + whatever cheap fruit I can get probably apples and raisins
beans on toast for dinner ald and aldi bread [ YUK tp the bread bit]
veg soup for tea every day !!!
Scones
Just about doable for a fiver but not exciting.

Phil – I graduated from uni last year and one of the guys I lived with probably lived on about £10 a week, that was cereal breakfast, cereal lunch and dried pasta with peas and cheese everyday. No variation. So i do accept if you really needed to you could. What I find hard to believe is when people say they can have a well balanced varied diet eating fresh veg everyday.

Sometimes you can’t afford more, ever considered this?

yes. but if you can only afford £1.42 a day for food then what are you doing wasting time on a mtb forum when you could sell the computer, cancel the internet and have more money to buy food (or look for a better paying job)
🙄