Wow what a week… Than you so much for all your comments and encouragement.
This week saw a lot more variety and some red meat. Looking deeper into the supermarkets, I can see it is difficult to incorporate red meat into a stand alone $25 per week budget 🙁
I know I am particularly blessed to live in an area where we have lots of quality bulk butchers around us. Consequently we eat lots of red meat at a budget price… we are most definitely carnivores here 🙂
For those of you following who may be near the Sunshine Coast, we actually travel down to Morayfield once every 3 months or so to Meat City and stock our freezer.
We are due to go possibly next weekend, so I will do a post showing what we buy.
I have had some questions that I will answer..
I can’t buy the items at my supermarket for the prices you list. How can I stick to $25?
I have priced all items from Woolworths Currimundi on the Sunshine Coast in Qld.
I realise that some items will be priced differently in other areas. In many cases you may be able to get items (especially fresh items) even cheaper that I have done from Woolworths.
Even if your area is more expensive, the shopping list should still be a budget shop. Don’t be to concerned if my $25 basket costs you even $30. These plans are not meant to be followed religiously. If you get the basics from my plans and can now afford add some ice-cream, chocolate and luxury items,,GREAT!!!!
You have not listed snacks or drinks, what are you having?
I am a tea drinker and have 5 or 6 cups of tea with milk but no sugar everyday.
This amount of tea means I go through a full 2 litres of milk every week. I also drink 2 liters of water most days. I have an old 2L cordial bottle on my desk at work and do try to get through it each day.
I am not normally a snacker, but I have bought the 57c packet of wafer biscuits each week and have had one or two with a cup of tea after dinner. There are 14 in the pack and I can recommend them as a really nice little snack.
Are you really having that many eggs?
Eggs have been my “go to” breakfast since I was a child. I really don’t like cereal and find if I do not have a protein breakfast, I will feel headachy and hungry by 10:00 or so.
I do often have baked beans as well and will often make a pot of beans and add chopped onion and bacon to the beans. Eggs to me are breakfast though and I don’t usually have them as a quick dinner like a lot of people do. Generally the only time eggs show up outside of breakfast is in a burger or maybe a ceaser salad.
You don’t have any fruit.
I am not normally a fruit eater. I do not have much of a sweet tooth. We do eat a lot of vegetables and rarely have dessert. I was quite surprised to see the prices of fruit while shopping and realise that fruit is a luxury item for many 🙁
So what is next??
I have devised 3 more stand alone $25 per week menus that will be in the resources section on the right hand side of this blog.
I may do some more stand alone menus in time, but now I will concentrate on fortnightly menus at under $50. Why? It has mentioned by many that Centrelink pays fortnightly so it makes sense to have a fortnightly shopping list. This will allow for a stockpile of ingredients to begin as well.
These $50 menus will be in 6-8 week blocks which should allow for ingredients to be used up.
I think this style of shopping is closer to real life, while still aiming for my goal of proving that you CAN feed yourself on just $25 per week.
So, please, keep following me and we will see how we go 🙂
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