How the £'s save themselves in the Budgetopian Household

So I've mentioned that in order to save, eventually invest and absolutely smash your way down the road to financial freedom, you have to follow a few basic rules, including getting yourself set up on a rough-if-needed-but-pristine-as-possible budget and setting yourself some realistic goals that'll make you feel good once achieved but also whilst achieving. All the while protecting yourself from any OH S*** moments with your emergency fund.

I've also even given you a few ways to get some quick wins in, building up a buffer to get you started on this journey of bliss and affluence.

Hopefully, if I'm doing a decent job, this all sounds simple and actionable enough.

Even knowing all this, every day I witness people sprinting as fast as they possibly can away from one single cold hard truth:

No amount of good budgeting, sensible goals or stacked emergency funds can save you if you spend TOO MUCH BLOODY MONEY!

Sorry for shouting at you, but it gets to me, and I've BEEN THERE. Remember the broke, overweight chicken shop addict undergrad? How could that poor bloke possibly ever hope to get ahead (or really even start) in life if he thought spending that much cash on terrible food was a good idea?

Even with a high salary, the problem with getting so used to spending more than you need is that the need to spend magically expands to fill (and eat away at) the salary you receive.

Before you know it, the £4 Friday night 'Tower Fillet and Chips with a can' turns into a £400 'Gold Dusted Organic Hand Reared Magical Worm Fed Super Chicken Burger', your pay rise goes out the window and you're broke again.

Enter the concept of Lifestyle Inflation. Ever wonder why your typical middle-class-no-kids couple with the two average-but-fairly-nice-cars in the drive who can 'only-afford-three-holidays-abroad-a-year constantly complain about being broke? Lifestyle inflation. The only way to counter spending more when you start earning more, is to be deeply and philosophically honest with yourself about your values and what really makes you happy, in order to SPEND LESS (and earn more).

Spend Less/Earn More isn't just mathematical. It starts with a good, solid budget, for sure: if you don't know where your money is going or where you want to allocate it, you don't have any control whatsoever. But the meat and bones of it is largely psychological - be content with less (even when less doesn't really mean less), and your 'needs' (read, wants) magically diminish until you realise, coupled with your budget showcasing the remarkable increasing gap between earning and spending, that you can retire yesterday.

Obviously slight hyperbole, but you get the point.

This will be a post for another day, but how do we work out how much money we need when we retire? Guess? Take averages? NO. We work out how much we spend per year, and then make a relatively conservative approximation of how long we need our pot to last for. Guess how we can bring that holy day of never having to work again closer?

Make the 'how much we spend per year' number smaller. This isn't about extreme frugality, or being miserable. It's about realising we spend far too much money on shite that when we really think about it means nothing to us, and realigning our spending with what actually matters.

So here is the OG Budgetopian's top tips for household saving - and I challenge you to follow along for a couple of weeks and see that 'spent' number mysteriously drop.

Annihilating Your Terrifying Grocery Bill

In attempting to cut our spending, areas we can do some seriously good damage are the ones where we spend a moderate amount frequently. Enter, the highly-likely-too-bloody-high grocery bill. This is a big one.

When trying to establish how much is 'normal' to spend on your weekly food shop, run as far away from 'normal' as your legs will carry you. Poking about online reveals some absolutely astonishing figures.

I really don't want to shame anybody here, but...

"Looking at the last few months, between £700-£1000 for a family of 3..."

"A monthly 'big' shop of about £150, then around £50 per week top up for the 2 of us..."

Obviously, this is a tiny sample size and I've cherry picked two that surprised me the most. In addition to this, when looking at averages we have no idea what the 'typical' family consists of. Caloric need as well as cultural differences in how we approach food vary massively, not to mention household income - but there are certain truths I feel will apply to just about everyone, and hey, if we're avoiding lifestyle creep, then household income shouldn't matter, right?

Firstly, if you are spending £150 at the start of the month and then a further £200 odd across the following weeks, you are probably either eating far too much food or shopping terribly, with no plan or conscientiousness towards your wallet or your food intake. If this is you, then you probably need to re-evaluate, so why don't we do it together?

Here are some very basic rules I can almost guarantee will save you £'s on your shopping if you don't follow them already.

Shop once a week

• If you shop every day, the chances are you have leftover food in your fridge or cupboards you could be using, and you are somebody that ends up throwing a lot of food away. You probably also avoid cooking numerous meals at once, preferring instead to buy ready-chopped-ready-cooked foods for your 'convenience'. This will be costing you £hundreds a month.
• If you shop once a month, you are setting yourself up for impulse buying and food wastage. Unless you are a demon food planner and prepper (in which case by all means carry on, you're smashing it!) there is no way you can possibly plan a months worth of food and meals in advance unless, again, you are only eating frozen ready meals or you are buying fresh produce that magically never goes bad.
• Shopping once a week allows you to plan a clear and realistic structure for what you want to eat for the next 5-7 days, as well as saving you both head and fridge space. Also, you will throw less food away, which is a massive win for your wallet and the planet.

Shop with a list

• When was the last time you went to the supermarket without a list and ended up at the checkout mind blown at the cost of your shop, huffing about the cost of living while you wheel your new inflatable paddling pool out to the car park? Make a plan for your food, write down what you need to buy, and challenge yourself to leave with ONLY those items. Thank me later.

Eat actual food

• This goes hand in hand with the last one, but the food on your list should be exactly that - food. We have been completely brainwashed into filling our baskets with food-shaped-objects, like the tub of rocky road I demolished earlier today, and the sooner we can train ourselves to eat real food again the better, not only for our wallets but also for our health and our happiness. Chocolate, sweets and oven pizza are delicious - they are also horrifically expensive and will only do us harm in the long run if they make up the bulk of our trolley's. Please do note that caveat - I'm all for a sweet treat after dinner, but be honest with yourself. How many £'s of your shop are spent on fresh, single ingredient foods?

Eat when you're hungry

• This one should be quite obvious - if you only eat when you need to, statistics suggest you'll probably eat less, and therefore buy less. I won't bore you with the facts that in 2023, 64% of all adults in the UK were obese, and that on average a healthy adult male needs 2500kcal a day while females need 2000kcal a day. Again, be honest with yourself, and question whether it's only £'s you could be saving. When I stopped inhaling multiple daily fried chicken burgers, I felt very quickly that it was my life too.

Reframe the treats

While not technically related to only shopping, this is huge for us. There are so many ways you spend less for greater fulfilment, you just have to start!

• Instead of hitting the Indian every friday night, spend less on nice curry paste for a fakeaway and have your mates over for beers.
• Buy flour, eggs and sugar and bake some New York style cookies instead of smashing £5 almond croissants from the local bakery. It isn't hard, trust me, even I can do it and not only do I love almost croissants but I'm useless in the kitchen.
• Instead of going to the pub after work and spending your precious life savings on extortionate pints, buy a nice bottle of wine from Aldi/Lidl and take your mates to the park. Public drinking isn't what it used to be, plus you'll make more precious memories and sit in less ciggy smoke. Win win.
• Have you ever bought a pizza base from the supermarket and covered it in every single one of your favourite toppings and smashed it down alongside homemade garlic bread? You've just had your last Domino's...

Other Top Budgetopian Shopping Tips

• Avoid brands like the plague - with vary rare exceptions. If in doubt, buy both one week and compare them. If it isn't ketchup, don't go Heinz. Challenge yourself to drop down one 'level' for each product when you next shop and compare the taste and the price.
• Aldi/Lidl over anything else. Apparently Asda is good too. Spending more for the same thing is not how to be a badass Budgetopian. Apart from Waitrose. Waitrose is incredible. (But ask yourself if it's really in the budget just yet).
• You don't need to be a miniature vegan to save money shopping. Buying fresh, whole foods, including eggs, meat and fish, and cooking them yourself, using significant amounts of fat (which is good for you) as well as salt and numerous spices is NOT expensive. Trust me, and try it.

I had far more planned for this post, including but not limited to:

1. Buying second hand furniture - why new is the new old.
2. Do you really need more clothes? Re-evaluating your Tardis wardrobe.
3. Why are your lights and heating on at midday in the Summer?

But, alas, it ended up running away from me - I'll leave them there for you to just mull over instead.

Sometimes, all it takes is for us to spend 5 minutes in our busy and often stressful lives to think about what truly matters to us, for remarkable results.

If you're here, then you've probably established that being financially free is important to you (or more likely I've just asked you really nicely to come and check out my blog). If your goals also include living more thoughtfully, for your health and the planet, as well as being a good role model for those around you, hopefully you'll be amazed at the ways you figure out you can improve whilst spending less. Consumption doesn't equal meaning and fulfilment and joy - doing things that bring us meaning and fulfilment and joy do, and more often those things are cheap, or even free.

Now write your bloody shopping list and go and get after it Budgetopian!

Cheers!

Energy

Don't be an idiot, turn off the lights

Second hand furniture

Make your rent more expensive - Overpay your bills for an easy date night