Well old habits die hard. By that I mean when I am sick and/or I hurt myself to the point where I can't walk or lift my husband will get fast food (takeaway) the last few days I have been sick and I have done something to my sciatic nerve causing me pain when pretty much just moving. Thankfully it has improved and we were able to do the shopping on Wednesday 3rd of Jan. Which leads to another old habit that I need to change which is going shopping every week!
So to change that I allotted a total of £240 ($304) for the month for food shopping & made a plan to only go shopping once a fortnight (every 2 weeks). I did buy 1kg (2.2lbs) of dried coriander (cilantro) as I do use quite a bit of it and it would cost a lot more money for me to buy fresh and freeze it (I am going to try growing it this year!) every single month! So after buying my bulk bag of herb we had £225 ($285) left. Now as I said above we did go shopping on Wednesday I did allot £150 ($190) for this shop to get most of everything possible in one go. However there was none of the cheapest "streaky" bacon (I am sorry that is normal bacon to my American self), there was none of the cheaper essential orange juice and well I did forget energy drinks. In my defense though Aldi was quite bare by the time I got there like large areas of missing product and I was more annoyed the essential orange juice was gone. I did have a few wins though!
Like I found that Tesco's 900g (1.9lb) block of cheese is normally £4.88 ($6.20) vs Aldi at £4.99 ($6.34) so a 11p (14 cents) saving on a single block of cheese, I did find later that Aldi had their own cheap 900g block of cheese on sale for the same price as Tesco's normal price! so I saved 22p (28 cents) on two blocks of cheese. I also found that Tesco's still had their own brand of kids yogurt in a 12 pack for only 73p (93 cents)! As it seems Aldi has stopped doing their own kids yogurt in a 12 pack and I can only buy a 6 pack at 79p ($1.00)! To be fair Aldi's 12 pack of kids yogurts were 85p ($1.08) so still more expensive than Tesco's! However with the fact that I can only currently buy 6 pack at Aldi vs 12 pack at Tesco's, that means I need to by 20x 6 packs of yogurt at Aldi vs only 10x 12 packs at Tesco a month, that also means I am spending £15.80 ($20.07) at Aldi vs £7.30 ($9.26) at Tesco's that is a £8.50 ($10.80) savings a month!
In total out of the £150 ($190) I took to do the food shop, I had £42 ($53) left over which is pretty good considering I had to buy 1 pack of bacon for Thursdays luncheon as I was craving bacon gravy and American biscuits (I have to say American biscuits as here in the UK biscuits are cookies where as American biscuits are more like a savoury scone!). I also ended up buying the orange juice that was more pricey and only bought 6 of those as that was the price of 8 of the cheapest essential orange juice!
I know I will need to time visits to Tesco's when we need to buy Banshee's cat food or when we are in the area of one of the two Tesco's I like to shop at when we do have food shopping money available that is.
So if I would have bought everything at Aldi (and if they had everything in stock and if I needed fruit) I would have spent roughly £144 ($183 ish) vs the Aldi and Tesco shop (again that is if they had everything and I needed fruit) would been a total of around £127 so a £17 ($21.60) difference not bad I don't think. I will be repeating this shop but with fruit in around a fortnight (2 weeks) at the soonest but more than like in about a month when I need more cat food for our girl Banshee.
I will say I hated shopping in Tesco's though as not only did I have the husband with me but we had both kids (7 girl & 3 boy). So a lot of the husband only half listening to me, our daughter wanting everything & our son decided it was nap time half way through. Thankfully Aldi was better as both the kids had a nap on the ride back toward the store so I was in there by myself and was able to pretty much run through there and I got lucky on a checkout till as well. I think I pretty much have all I need meat wise for the month, my pantry is stocked to the brim and then some, I just need to adjust our dinner's as we did have takeaway a few times in the last 2 weeks (yea I know loss of money spent on rubbish food I know I know) and that is really down to me getting sick I believe I ended up getting covid and when I had covid once before in like 2022 roughly it caused my bones to like ache and it just really sucked!
We also got a few too good to go bags via the too good to go app on Friday & Saturday. We originally purchased four bags from our local Aldi for Friday but they cancelled all of them because they wanted to change the pick up time and I only managed to get one bag as I was notified 15+ minutes after the original four bags were cancelled. I don't think I will attempt to get any more bags from my local Aldi as they really should already have a set time for bag collections that works well for them plus it is slightly off putting to take so long to collect and while I get some places don't have much to save they should not have put a 6 pack of apples that were practically mush in the collection that is my personal opinion. However the two 6 pack of bread rolls and ham, corned beef slices, a pack of 2 peri peri chicken slices (little puff pastry pocket things) and a pack of 2 cheese & bean slices will be used. So because of the cancelling of bags to change the collection time, the wait time to collect and the lack of ease in collecting plus the bad food thrown in I think will stick to my local Morrison's daily too good to go bags as they are the absolute best I get so much with them and the people are just really nice there and never had a bad bag from there!
Speaking of Morrison's daily I managed to snag two bags from there for Saturday night. We got so much in those two bags! we got 2x each of: wild rocket,their best oranges, pepperoni pizza's, 6 packs pitta's, tuna and sweetcorn baguettes,breaded chicken tenders, chicken & bacon pasta's, 2 bags easy peelers *most of these had sadly gone bad*. We got 2 different types of doughnuts, a chicken and something baguette, a large croissant & we got four twin packs of boiled eggs. Below is a photo of my Morrison's "haul" quite a bit and we ate very well over the weekend with lots of choices!
We also got two bags from one of our nearby Gregg's on Friday, those were not cancelled like the aldi bags and we got two bags full of sandwiches, doughnuts and cookies well worth the £6.30($8.02) paid for both bags! We also bought two bags from the same Greggs for that Saturday and again both bags were full of sandwiches, doughnuts and cookies! so we spent a total of £12.90 ($16.42) for all four bags over the two days. So below is a photo of what we got with the two Greggs bags from Saturday I think there was slightly more in the ones the day before but that is most likely because these bags really did not have much that I like to eat.
We also found a local small business offering a few too good to go bags for Saturday. They do food stuff like doughnuts, waffles, ice cream etc so pretty much a dessert bag so we thought hey why not try them it's a local small business so we originally bought one bag but by the time the collection time rolled around they still had a few available so we went ahead and bought another bag. This small business is only open like 3 days a week because they are in a small building split into market stalls so they don't have much of a choice unless they move but I assume that rent is so cheap that the 3 days they are open a week they more than make enough. So we spent a total of £10 ($12.72) & we got loads of sugar doughnuts! The equivalent of two large waffles and two slush drinks. The doughnuts were delicious! I will be going to their stall and buying more of their doughnuts as they are so darn good every once in a while that is.
Now I did put the Aldi & Morrison's too good to go bags under our food shopping budget and spent only £9.90. The other four bags went under the takeaway budget as that made more sense to me and those were a total of £22.90 ($29.14). I do think I will try and utilize the too good to go app more often & this will probably be more at the weekend than the week day as I don't drive so I would need my husband plus it would also need to be around the times when we know we will be out near the places anyway as to save on fuel or if we have not gone out at all and we are getting a few bags that off set the fuel cost if you will. We did get a good amount of food out of the takeaway bags from the Greggs and the small local business, next time if I remember I'll take a photo of what we got from each place I only thought about that when we got the Greggs on Saturday evening as well as the Morrison's food bags. The food bags were great and that was because of Morrison's food bags.
I am just starting my budgeting for this year and yes I have gone off budget due to being sick but we are in a good place money wise. In fact we have paid off a few of our short term debts which is one of the main reasons I started to do this budgeting!
Sunday, the day I plan to publish this blog post. I will be making at least two loaves of bread, organizing my kitchen after it's on going remodel, a good tidy up of the living room including putting some pretty thin blankets I got years ago at a new age market stall in Loughborough UK *I still think of the wonderful husband and wife that ran the stall and I hope they and their family is doing well I miss seeing them!*, tidy up of our dinning room, organizing our freezers, as well as tidy up our room & the kids room. Thinking about it I need to go through their toys and throw out broken ones and see what soft toys if anything need fixing or washing. Oh and at least 3 loads of laundry glad I have my wood burning stove as I will be using it to dry our laundry, and of course get my daughter PE kit and swim kit together and put into their bags and ready to go for the week.
Thank you dear reader for reading my post I am sure you are thinking my writing is everywhere and your right it is and it's something I am still trying to improve on, but thank you all the same for reading my randomness! I hope you have a wonderful week and nothing but good things come to you and yours!
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