First Person: Stretching Your Food Budget and Making Your Money Go Further

Cutting down on your food budget and reducing how much money you spend on food is essential for cutting down both your monthly outgoings and household spending. Spending less on food can help improve and increase your personal finances and leave you feeling better all around.

Grow What You Eat

There are many ways to cut down your food budget. One of them is to grow your own food and produce. From vegetables to potatoes, you could save money by growing your own fruit and vegetables year upon year.

Planning

Another way you can slash your food costs is by creating meal plans and only buying what you need for these meals, plus of course a few treats! Going shopping with meal plans can help you save money as you are not buying ingredients and products you will not use, or use up. You will be throwing less food away and making more of the food you do have which will help your food budget.

Buy Store Brands

A popular and very economical way to cut down your food budget is to buy own brand/store brand products. Buying stores own products and essentials from pasta to bread will help you both to save money and stretch your food budget further, as by not buying lead name brands you will be able to stock up on more food for the same price.

Freeze It

A fantastic way to stretch your food budget is to cook a bigger meal than you normally would and freeze it for consumption on a later date. For example you could make soup for two nights, use up one nights worth and freeze the remainder. I am sure you will see by cooking more you will actually be saving more time and money, and you will be using up all the items you buy.

Get imaginative with your food choices and your meal plans, and don't be afraid to try new things in the kitchen. To make your food budget go even further you could see how you can use leftovers to create new meals.

From personal experience I have found that you can make your grocery and food budget go a lot further than you might think with just a bit of forward thinking, forward planning and of course not shopping when you're hungry. The most important thing I found when reducing and stretching my budget was that you don't have to give up the foods and drinks you love if you are clever about it.

More from this contributor:
Getting healthy and staying healthy
How to sort out your spending
How to manage your personal finances