Mum offers her top tips to slash your family’s food bill after she cut hers to just £20 a MONTH
Laura Ansbro, 33, and husband Max, 38, reveal how they slashed their £280 monthly Waitrose bill
SUPER savvy mum Laura Ansbro has slashed her family food bill down to just £20 a MONTH – by only eating discounted and free grub.
When the 33-year-old left her marketing job three years ago to be a full-time mum to Wilf, now three, she and husband Max, 38, an engineer, decided to overhaul their spending — and realised that they could slash their £280 monthly Waitrose bill.
Now, while one puts Wilf to bed the other scours five local supermarkets looking for reductions of a minimum of 80 per cent. And they have three freezers in which to stash their bargains.
‘CHICKENS FOR 60P’
Laura said: “We can’t go there looking for what we want — we just have to buy what there is available.
“A recent shop of a couple of pizzas, 40 eggs, 12 courgettes, three packs of fine beans, three packs of parsnips, three punnets of blueberries, 27 garlic bulbs, two bags of salad leaves, a tub of olives, a punnet of mushrooms, a pack of bacon, eight apples and six kiwi fruit cost me £4.59. It should have been £50.24.
“Our best bargain ever was the time we bought six whole chickens for 60p each.
“We had a roast, butchered a few into thighs and breasts and froze the rest.”
The couple, from Amesbury, Wilts, also grow veg in their garden, forage in fields for wild spinach, repair their clothes and have got rid of energy-scoffing gadgets such as flash phones and TVs.
Laura’s top money-saving tips
- Batch cook - soups and casseroles
- Go late-night shopping for extra-reduced items
- Make your own food
- Be flexible about what you’re eating
- Get a big freezer
- Forage locally and don’t be afraid of ‘out of date’ foods
Laura said: “It has made us happier and healthier.
“Some weeks we don’t buy anything as we have so much stashed away. On others it might just be a few pints of milk. On average it’s about £20 a month.
“I make loads of soups from what we find. Some-times the vegetables are a bit mushy at one end but we’ll just cut that off. If somebody had said that we would live like this a decade ago I would have thought they were mad.
“I do occasionally miss the Waitrose life, buying whatever I fancied. We still shop there for a few things where the quality really matters, such as curry pastes, and use the vouchers from our John Lewis credit card.
“Hosting dinner parties has been a little trickier but we just make sure to plan in advance based on what we have in the freezer. I always get compliments when I cook for people.
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“Life is so different now but it is a lot less stressful.
“It is shocking just how much money I was wasting before. Our plan is to eventually save enough money to buy a property with some land in Europe.
“If we keep living on £20 a month we hope we will be able to.”