MABS - Passionate about Budgeting - Top 10 tips from www.mabs.ie

I thought my 200 euros between six was quite reasonable but obviously I'm wrong...that is 150 in dunnes each week and then roughly another 50 give or take between other shops throughout the week...I usually spend some of that in aldi for their rolls and fruit backs. Bread alone in an average week comes to 20 quid alone between lunches and toast etc. I do insist on buying traceable meat and fresh fruit and vegNot lover of processed foods ..too unhealthy. It proves though that it costs more to eat healthily .

whiteoaks100 said:

I thought my 200 euros between six was quite reasonable but obviously I'm wrong...that is 150 in dunnes each week and then roughly another 50 give or take between other shops throughout the week...I usually spend some of that in aldi for their rolls and fruit backs. Bread alone in an average week comes to 20 quid alone between lunches and toast etc. I do insist on buying traceable meat and fresh fruit and vegNot lover of processed foods ..too unhealthy. It proves though that it costs more to eat healthily .

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Start shopping in Lidl instead of Dunnes and you'll save at least €50 per week. I can't agree with you that it costs more to eat healthily, I've found quite the opposite.

DaveD said:

Start shopping in Lidl instead of Dunnes and you'll save at least €50 per week. I can't agree with you that it costs more to eat healthily, I've found quite the opposite.

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umm... to a point... however, when I dig down into the healthy stuff that people buy to keep their household spend down I notice a lot of

cheap sausages (I buy sausages but insist on 80%+ pork so it's actually nutritious)
cheap mince (again, high fat content)
bulking out - making the protein part go further by adding breadcrumbs and other stuff - just more carbs for your family
small amounts of meat and lots of pasta/rice/potatoes/bread etc.
cheap chicken - god knows what is injected into it...

I read a post once by someone saying that they made a lovely dinner for 4 adults with 5 eggs and how cheap it was - If I had been one of those adults I would have been into a chipper on the way home ravenous!

With regard to budgeting, here are some of the basics I've learned which are more for people who haven't really budgeted or thought about money before (or who think about it a lot but never get anywhere). Some of these things I knew and/or read about but didn't really 'get' for a long time. Some are so simple that people who don't have many problems with managing money will have difficulty imagining that anyone could be that silly. So forgive me for stating the obvious to a certain extent (because even the obvious takes some element of acceptance before it can do any good).

1. Only spend what you have
2. If at all possible, spend less than you have (this should be the norm)
3. Overdrafts and credit cards do not count as money that you 'have'
4. There are essentially two ways to budget, imo. In the first you know exactly what your outgoing should be for each category of weekly, monthly and annual expenses you have come up with. You have allocated money to each of these within the parameters of what you earn and make sure to include some amount for savings. The second is where you know the fixed amounts you need to pay each week, month, year and after deducting these amounts from what you earn, you divide the rest by four (or five, depending on the month) and that's how much money you have to spend on food, household supplies, going out and everything else in that week. This latter method of budgeting sometimes seems like the only way to go but overall just isn't terribly effective (having said that, it's what I've done for most of the time I've spent trying to get out of debt - nearly there now. I didn't really understand properly what a budget could be, I just wanted to know how much money I could spend. I know realise that every time I told myself that if I had any leftover at the end of the week, it would go straight to paying off debt/savings, I was just fooling myself.

But if I understood the original post correctly, this thread is about compiling a list of the top ten tips on the mabs website so now I'm off to have a read of that. Or should it be a top ten of tips already on AAM?