SAHMS/single income families

I feel the same! We somehow spend $500-$600 a week on groceries. I eat gluten free so it’s more expensive but I don’t even know how I spend that much. I feel like every time we get food for dinner it’s $60 plus nappies and everything else.

We are living with my mum, paying minimal rent (bless her) and are still struggling. Our grocery budget is around $170 and we are still running out of food by the end of the week and I don't usually have things to eat during the day. Do you have any food outlet shops near you? They have really good deals, mainly for pantry food and some frozen. Also there's this site called askizzy which shows you food banks and stuff in your area, and one called wiselist which shows you all the specials across shops so you can plan your groceries, and they also have deals with insurances etc and a forum with great budgeting tips They really haven't made it easy for us single income families :/ I've even started making my own bread, doing more baking and making more things from scratch so I don't spend extra money

@Jordan Omg yes and nappies😫 it’s insane how much everything has gone up lately…

@Sanara i’ll have to check food outlets near me that sounds awesome because we have gone to making everything from scratch aswell so that would definitely help keep pantry staples in stock in my house. Thanks i’ll check out askizzy thanks for the recommendation! i know sometimes there seems like no end in sight!!

I grocery shop once a week, plan all of our meals for the week, and do one big cooking session on Sundays. I make 4 dinner meals, and 10 x small lunch meals that hubby takes to work (he eats 2 per day). Leftovers from dinner are lunch for myself and our 11 year old. I make meals such are meatloaf/scalloped potatoes/peas, enchiladas, shepherds pie, chilli, stir fry, etc, which uses cheaper meat, or else vegetarian dishes. Most of the meals I make, I double the batch, which helps me use the entirety of vegetables such as celery or a bag of potatoes, so none of it goes to waste. By cooking once a week, and then freezing a couple of the meals, and having a solid plan for all the leftovers, I’ve taken our food waste down to practically nothing. Beforehand, I would constantly be throwing out veggies that had died in our crisper. It took a couple of weeks to get in the groove, but now I can’t imagine approaching meals any other way!

@Porsche would you mind sharing your food budget?

The cost of living these days is ridiculous so I’ve tried so many things to cut costs down and I found the best for our groceries is using the Woolworths app and I get most of our items from the half price list and if I can’t find what I need on that then I looks at the low price list and then I look at the specials list and after I’ve exhausted all the sales lists I’ll search up anything else in need and buy homebrand of that, by doing this I’ve gotten our weekly groceries down to $150 with nappies and wipes it’s more like $200 but our food actually lasts 1.5 weeks which is awesome for our wallets

Our groceries are up to $800/month with 2 adults 3 kids age 8, 3, and 1 yo.

We cook cheap simple meals such as lentils, minced meat and veggies stir fry, pasta and cook a big batch of them which lasts us a few days. We also make sure to use up what we have in our fridge first before buying more groceries. We dont eat out at all except on special occasions. We only registered one car and got rid of alot of our subscriptions.

We are living on 1 income too. My wife just changed job so I'm not 100% sure what the annual salary is but definitely under 100k. We also aren't permanent residents, so we don't get all the help from Centrelink you guys do, my wife had to take her parental leave unpaid and obviously being a same sex couple we had to fork out 15k just for her to get pregnant. All that to say, the only way we are making it (not saying we're living a lush life but bills are paid) is an iron strong budget. And to know what your priorities are. For example we completely stopped eating out / take away etc we don't go out for drinks, we don't drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, we rarely buy clothes and when we do we try to go to op shop first especially for baby. We are a vegan household, and if you do it right, it does cost less. Meat/fish/dairy is the most expensive in a supermarket. Vegan replacements are also expensive but if you want to be healthy it's best you avoid it anyway.

Our priority is on traveling, we obviously don't have the funds anymore to travel abroad but every couple months we go away for a long weekend. That's really the only spending we do. And the way I'm able to do that, is the budget. If that can help this is how I do it : first we have a joint account and a personal account each. We are paid in our personal accounts and every time we are paid we transfer the amount of money I would have determined when doing the budget, to our joint account. I start by making a list of all the bills and other types of payment we have : rent, electricity, gas, water, insurances, groceries, pets needs, vet, baby needs, formula if using, nappies, internet, Netflix/Spotify &others, Petrol, any subscriptions, medications, if you see specialists like chiro/physio, babies activities etc literally everything. That will first tell you if you are living above your means, and if so that's when you look at which spending can be reduced.

If you are left with some money after doing that then that will be savings, i determined the amount and it will go in the savings account as soon as we are paid, we don't wait until the next pay otherwise it just gets spent. This year I have also made the same budget for our personal accounts with our personal spending to help both of us get back on track with our savings. I have also created another "saving account" that I called expenses account, so the surplus of money goes in the savings account but all the money I have listed above goes in the expenses account (I just don't like leaving money in our everyday account in case we get scammed or loose the card etc) so that we never have to go and take money out of the savings account.

At the moment we try to limit ourselves to $150 groceries a week, it's hard and I'm trying to be savvy about it, like where I get my fruit and veg which are our main source of food, I research how to make certain things myself instead of buying it ready etc I cook everyday from scratch and that does cost less ! Also I only do groceries every fortnight, I found I spend less than if I go every few days. It also helps make sure to use all the stuff in my pantry, we tend to just accumulate dry food/cans/sauces etc I'm not there yet, but my goal at the moment is to go back to doing a fortnightly menu and doing ingredients prep on the weekend, that helps a lot not buying things you don't actually need. I also do ALDI+ woolies sometimes Coles only because ALDI doesn't have much vegan stuff.

Anyway, this economy is fucked. Try and see around you, a neighbourhood centre or something that works with Oz harvest for example where you can get free food boxes. I heard quite a few organisations do that, or if not free very cheap.

Honestly we stopped counting our groceries months ago, it’s pointless because everything is so expensive. 3 adults, 1 9yo, 1 10mo, 2 dogs & 1 cat; our bank insights say Jan was $1,753 on groceries, which is astounding.