Top 10 ways to cope with rising household costs
I was a bit shocked to see that we had overspent by £175 on our Housekeeping account but it is not yet the end of the month. My initial reaction was to be cross with myself for not keeping on top of the spending, for not sticking to the budget and for not doing things like menu planning. I also assumed that the overspend was due in part to the fact we have had lots of friends and family come to stay recently and on these occasions we tend to cook some special meals and have more beer and wine than we do when are at home alone and had eaten out several times.
I chatted to Bealers about our overspend expecting him to be annoyed but in fact he wasn’t and instead he mentioned the fact that a friend of ours had written about rising food costs
When I read her blog post & comments from others where recent increases in food prices had been noticed by individuals but downplayed by the media I realised that our overspend was not a one off as I scanned our grocery receipts and looked for where the obvious luxuries had increased the food bill but couldn’t actually find any.
If food and other household essentials are to take a bigger part of our monthly income we decided to take the following action steps to ensure that we are still able to live within our means and not nibble away at our savings.
- Be stricter with our weekly food shop and prepare meal plans in advance
- Cook simple, low cost meals (shepherd’s pie, vegetable pasta sauces, risotto, omlettes, soups) instead of fancy meals with exotic ingredients (Thai vegetable green curry, pizzas with pepperoni & mozerella)
- Use online grocery shopping as less tempted by ‘off list’ things and can also tally up the total before getting to the checkout
- Eat less meat (especially as we buy organic meat which is more expensive than tasteless factory farmed meat) and buy fewer gluten-free cakey treats
- Buy zero pre-prepared food. Hard as we buy very little but do usually have veggie sausages etc in the freezer
- Use the food in the freezer, cupboards at the end of the month instead of buying more food (eg. use the bread machine to use the packets of bread flour instead of buying loaves costing £1.10)
- Have an emptier fridge so we can see at a glance what it contains rather than having things going off at the back
- Buy fewer convenience foods for the children (don’t buy many anyway but had got into the habit of buying small juice cartons for lunch boxes but the kids take a bottle of water to school anyway)
- Buy in bulk for things we use a lot of where possible (eg. potatoes, carrots, beer, meat) at the beginning of the month having worked out approximatly how much we’ll need and try to use no more (just like people used to do in days gone by according to Mrs Beeton’s book of household management)
- Plant and grow plenty of vegetables we use a lot of or ones that can be used for lots of different recipes (eg. tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, parsnips)
- Explore the ‘Value’ range at the supermarket - already buy Value butter and this week discovered that the kids don’t care about the Value bourbons in the biscuit tin or the Value fromage frais in the packed lunches.