Thursday 23 January 2014

family money series – part one the family food shop


As a family of four (including my husband who can easily eat for three if he’s training), we spend a lot of our income on the our food shopping.  When I left work to be a stay at home mum, our income dramatically changed and we had to make changes to our spending habits.  As parents we want to eat as healthily as possible while still saving money.

As part of our Family money series, this article will let you in on how we went about making a few simple changes to save money and still buy what we need, so grab a cuppa and read on……….


We have always shopped at the main supermarkets, mainly Tesco.  More often than not we would do our monthly shop and easily spend £200 at the end of the month and then have to pop out for a few bits which could easily amount to £60 a week.  When this was no longer financially an option for us, looking for a cheaper alternative seemed impossible.  We had seen that Aldi had recently opened a new store in our town so we decided to give it a try, for things like tins and packets.  What we discovered was amazing.

Aldi mainly sell their own brands(you can get certain named brands, but don’t expect to find them), while products may look different the quality is usually equal to or better than the branded alternatives. 

One major difference between Aldi and the major supermarkets is the till area, even at Christmas we waited to pay for around five minutes!  Why is it so different ?  Well as your shopping is scanned you put in directly into your trolley and pack it after you have paid at the front of the store.  Yes this can be a little scary, you have to move quickly to get everything in your trolley as it flies through(no conveyor belt), and it certainly keeps you fit.  But as a months shop will take approximately 4 minutes to be scanned and paid for there is no reason for queues at the checkout.

So did we save any money ?…………………..we certainly did infact a lot!!!

20140116_120706[1] this is my till receipt from shopping yesterday and it was for a weeks shopping, this is pretty typical for our family.


I wanted to show you just exactly how much cheaper Aldi is compared to other supermarkets so I did a little comparison.  I came across the mysupermarket site and compared my shopping this week to 5 other supermarkets and was actually rather pleased with how much I have saved.
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as you can see my weekly shop was on average around £20 cheaper, now that’s impressive :)

If you are thinking you maybe want to try Aldi out and see how much you could save, please take a look at our favourite Aldi products – tried and tested.

Have you swapped your supermarket recently, have you noticed a difference ?



all things small and pretty

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