The Student Finance Blog

I know it’s very tempting to just run out and grab that take away pizza, Chinese or kebab from across the road because you either can’t be bothered to rustle something up or you have no ingredients in the cupboard. But I’m speaking from experience here when I say that you will put on a lot of weight and you will find yourself skint. You’ll probably be shocked if you added up how much you spend on takeaways every month, it’s so much cheaper and healthier to cook your favorite meals, especially if you follow some of the tips I will outline in this post.

Group Shopping
It’s a very good and sensible decision to create a house or flat shopping kitty, for example five of you place £10 into the kitty and one person every week will be charged with the responsibility of shopping for the ingredients. You as a group can come up with a shopping list including all the essentials and some extra requests or luxuries which have been approved by the whole group. Arranging a weekly group shopping budget and list can lead to and encourage the next point of group cooking.

Group Cooking
If you have a person in the house who loves cooking or if everyone would like to take turns, it’s a much better idea to cook for the whole group, it’s a real pain when you have 5 or more people in the same cramped kitchen trying to cook five different meals. So decide a group what you would like and do it! This works much better if you have a group shopping list and budget. This also discourages anyone from being tempted by ordering a takeaway. Granted it can be pretty hard to decide on something that everyone likes, especially if there are five or more of you in the house. Next we’re going to talk about how you can do all the above much cheaper.

Change your Supermarket
These days it seems that food prices keep going up as with everything else, these costs have to be passed on to the consumer. But some supermarkets are much cheaper than others, for example shopping and Marks & Spencer’s as a student is financial suicide, but I don’t think many actually do their weekly shop there, if you do I would love to hear from you and what your weekly bill is. Supermarket’s such as Asda and Tesco are very cheap and offer some great discounts, but they can be expensive for some products. If you would like even cheaper, why not shop at Lidl or Aldi, they offer quality products for a very cheap price, despite a negative stigma which is richly undeserved. I promise you won’t be disappointed by the food on offer at these discount supermarket who have reported an increase in sales and popularity during this worrying economic period.

Change your Brands
Are you one of those people who must have everything made by those famous and favourite brands? If so, it really is time to change and open your horizons, you will often find that a supermarket’s own brand these days are of the same quality as some of the popular branded products but at the fraction of the price. Even by dropping the brands on some everyday products such as bread, butter, baked beans, orange juice and sausages etc. can drastically drop your food bill every month.

Following these simple steps and changes can not only improve the atmosphere in your house, but will improve your health, diet and wallet, so give these steps a try and let me know if you find them helpful, or if you already do these things, why not share your thoughts in the comments box below.

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