Monthly Food Shop

I am interested to see how it works for you. I have spent time this weekend trying to do a shopping list with a fortnight meal plan & am also trying to cut the budget or at least stay in it. After writing out the list I now see why I can not stick to it.

Will the monthly shop save you $ & will you do a monthly meal plan.

I find I am seriously over spending if I don't plan & do extra shops for those little things I shop at pns & will try the new veg shop that has just opened up the road.

my husband gets paid monthly and has done for years now and i just cant get my head round the monthly shop. I even got a chest freezer but still never seem to buy more than a fortnights worth at a time.

I think the reason why I pop in or don't get everything I need in week one is so I can see what is on special...it would be ok if I stuck to my list I guess.

We are a family of 5 & I budget $400 a fortnight on paper but never stick to it, maybe its too unrealistic..

We did monthly shops when down to one income when I was off with DD and will start them again soon when my PPL runs out this time round. DH gets paid monthly so it is just easier to budget.

We use 10 meals and just times the menu by 3 to get a monthly menu... We buy everything but milk and fruit and veg... Buy meat and bread monthly and freeze it, dont eat a lot of bread so have in freezer normally anyway...If we hit sales on meat at pak n save we save heaps!!!

We budget $400 a month at the supermarket and up to $50 a week for fruit veg and milk, which is a lot and we hardly ever spend that much...

My only worry is that it takes two trolleys to buy and now we will have to wrangle two kids this time round...

Be interesting to hear how others do it... Takes a lot of planning!

MrsEmma wrote: I do online shopping with Countdown so that helps again with not impulse buying as I just stick to my list.

I have yet to give online shopping a try. Is Countdown really that much more expensive than PNS? Maybe I should take my last PNS docket and do a dummy shop to compare, it certainly would be an interesting excercise albeit a time consuming one. How much do they charge for delivery? I just noticed though that our butcher offers online shopping, either with delivery or you can order online and then collect it yourself. I very much like that idea and willl do this for my next shop with them.

Edited by sem - 08 October 2012 at 10:37am

Yes I also include items like washing powder, soap and shower gel.

Bizzy, one of the reasons I want to change to monthly is so I can keep better track of how much I spend!

We are a family of four and I *try* to spend only $60 per person per week. That includes everything - fresh fruit & veg, meat, toiletries, cleaning stuff, nappies etc. Having two kids in nappies is a bit of a killer.

re online shopping, dummy shops etc - I did this experiment a couple of weeks ago. I had been getting deliveries from Woolworths (Countdown doesn't deliver to us but Woolworths does) but only things that were on special, and getting the rest from New World. I was considering switching to PNS which is a bit further away so would need to be cheaper to justify the extra time/petrol etc. I am a bit of a nerd so I had this spreadsheet which had my usual shopping list on it with the prices I would pay at Woolworths and New World, and went to PNS to do a comparison, with DS2 in the pram. Within 5 minutes I was approached by a manager who asked me whether I was "price surveying". For some reason I took leave of my senses and said yes. I was stupidly proud of my wee spreadsheet and my mission and thought he was going to congratulate me on my organisation and perhaps hold me up as a paragon of budgeting to other customers (I know, laugh it up). I hadn't really given what I was doing a name in my head but "price surveying" sounded about right so I proudly said "why yes, yes I am" and started to show him my cool/geeky spreadsheet.

He nearly threw me out of PNS!! He was all "we don't allow price surveying here" and asked me who I was working for (just like in a spy movie, lol). He looked mega confused when I said "me" and I could almost see the cogs turning in his head as he tried to work out where I was on the crazy spectrum. When he clicked that I was just a nerdy/bored SAHM his attitude changed and he started explaining why PNS would always be cheaper than its competitors etc etc.

ANYWAY one of the things he said is that in addition to the delivery fees at Countdown/Woolworths for online shopping, the online prices are often a bit more expensive than instore. Now obviously he is working for the competition but I doubt he would outright lie like that - would be worth checking out before changing completely to online shopping. And if you're going to do a dummy run at PNS be more discreet than I was or expect to have to explain yourself!

i dont have a budget for food... i know how much i expect or want to spend though. Meat seems to be my biggest problem. I dont do chicken unless it is free range (apart from the fact it tastes nicer) and it is the same for bacon, has to be free farmed. i only do free range eggs as well and when i buy nuggets for the kids they are only ingham - cause they have a higher percentage of actual chicken in them. I also dont do sealord products and wont buy fish previouly frozen. I also dont buy Chinese garlic and try to get NZ grown fruit and veges. Bit fussy i am.

I think the other thing i have the biggest problem with is breakfast cereal. I hate how much they charge for something we need. I dont do coloured cereals so no fruit loops and such but i try and get the kids a "treat" cereal occasionally like the chocolate O's or something similar. My husband doesnt like weetbix or rice bubbles and after spending so long convincing him to eat breafast i feel i should buy him something he likes too lol! So sometimes i have four cereals in my trolley - weetibx, cornflakes, Choc O's and maybe Just right (but only if it is on special).

Ok, so I have just used my PNS docket and 'bought' the exact same products at Countdown online.