How I plan to budget for our essentials this year

This year has started well as we began by planning our meals every two weeks, only doing a big food shop the first week and then getting my any small fresh food bits that we need the week after, so far it’s working well. We know exactly what meals we’re having, cooking five different meals the first week; enough for four people, and freezing half to be eaten the following week, which means we get a week off from cooking dinners. We’ve choseymeals that we both like and that aren’t to boring to cook so my fiancé who has a flair for cooking doesn’t get bored. We have meat roughly 4 times a week and fish or vege the other three days. I cook a big batch of soup for our week day lunches every Sunday, as well as preparing a large frittata that I divide up for my breakfasts also for the week days. We budgeted to spend around £300 a month on food, cleaning materials and toiletries, we only spent £65 the first two weeks so we are well under budget so far, but I’m sure that once we start to use up all the things we have, the budget might get tight.

For us this year we are really motivated not to spend our money on silly things as we need every penny for our wedding, it also helps that we get the satisfaction from buying things that we want for our wedding; using the budget to buy things that can be used in other ways or sold afterwards to get the money back. We are also getting more creative for example when we ran out of kitchen roll which we usually use to clean things like mirrors or spills etc. We started to use old tea towels and wet wipes that we stocked up on last year.

I had a feeling that as soon as we started to try to spend less, something would break or need repairing, it’s sods law, so of course our microwave has given up. We use it every day to defrost meat and cook various things that aid in preparing our meals, as well as defrosting our whole second week of dinners. I’m just glad it wasn’t something bigger (fingers crossed I’m not tempting fate!) however, I’m determined not to buy a new one, millions of people do not have microwaves and are perfectly fine without them, it will take a small adjustment and some organisation so that we remember to get meals out the night before so they can defrost before we reheat them. Simple