Living comfortably/healthy for under £15 a week

I eat on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I don't.

This thread is titled "Living comfortably/healthy", however you've spent all your £15 on food.

Don't forget rent, utilities, travel expenses,


I'm struggling with £180 a week. For me, it costs weekly:

£100 for rent.
£20 for bus fares.
£30 for utilities (our gas and electric comes to about £100-150 a week between the five of us).
£5 on phone bills.
£25 on food (we have to eat out for as cheap as we can get, our kitchen isn't usable).

I eat on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I don't.

Currently only budgeting £15 a week (buying food from Tesco) I thought i'd share my weekly meal plan for anyone who is struggling to live healthily/comfortably on a low budget.

Shopping List:
Tesco Bread X 2 - 94p
Tesco Bananas - 5x12.2p - 61.2p
Tesco Onions - 2x15.8p - 31.6p
Tesco Round Lettuce - 50p
Tesco Royal Loose New Potatoes - 5x17.9p - 89.4p
Tesco 4 Pints Milk - £1
Medium Welsh Cheddar 150g - £1.50
Tesco Wafer Thin Ham 364g - £1.50
Tesco Value 8 Pork Sausages - 66p
Tesco Value Chips 1.5kg - 82p (CHIPS USED OVER 3 WEEKS) - 27p
Tesco Value Frozen Mince 950g - £3 (USED OVER 2 WEEKS) - £1.50
Tesco Chicken & Mushroom Pie - 66p
Tesco Steak & Kidney Pie - 66p
Tesco Value Tinned Peas X 4 - 80p
Tesco Value Pasta Sauce - 39p
Tesco Value Baked Beans - 24p
Tesco Value Red Kidney Beans - 21p
Tesco Value Tomato Soup - 24p
Tesco Value Gravy Granules - 20p

Total Cost - £13.09 (Excluding cost of butter/lard, rice and pasta but theyre extremely cheap).

Breakfast is the same every day - 3 Pieces of Toast with butter(lasts for ages)

Lunch is also the same - Ham Sandwich with 2 Pieces of bread and added lettuce and onion + banana

Dinner Numbers 1&2 (Have twice in the week) -
Sausage, Mash & Peas - 4 Sausages, 300g of potato & a tin of peas.

Dinner Numbers 3&4 -
Chilli Con Carne (without the chilli) - 150g of Mince, with a third of a jar of pasta sauce, half a tin of Red Kidney Beans served with 80g (weight when uncooked) rice.
[Note-Price of rice is not included as it's so cheap its pretty much negligible & bought in bulk.]

Dinner Number 5 -
Pasta Bolognaise - 150g of Mince, and a third of a jar of pasta sauce served with 100g (weight when uncooked) of pasta.

Dinner Numbers 6 & 7 -
Pie, 125g of Chips served with peas.


Snacks -
Toast - As I should usually have quite a lot of spare bread.
Beans on toast - Usually buy one can per week.
Beans on toast with grated cheese.
Cheese on toast.
Chips - Bag is usually used over 4 weeks but if I get hungry I can make chips and use over 3 weeks instead, not much difference in price.
Cheesy Chips.
Milk - Not exactly a snack but has a lot of protein.
Tomato Soup (+Toast).

£100 for rent is quite steep. Where do you live?

£20 a week for bus fares is a lot. Can't you buy a bus pass which would work out cheaper?

£80-£120 a month per person for bills? You're either being ripped off or you're massively wasting energy. We each spent less than £40 a month for bills in our house last year (works out at about £10 a week).

£5 on phone bills can be avoided. Use Facebook as much as you can to contact people.

As far as food, don't eat out. Make your own food and buy supermarket brands where the quality isn't too different from branded products.

Oxford. We're paying £2000 a month for our 5 bed because Oxford Brookes oversubscribed their halls and bought out all the student properties in the city, leaving nothing for the rest of us and so the landlords are charging extortionate rates for crappy houses.

We have to eat out, we can't use the kitchen or have any food in the house.

The house is energy performance rated G, There's no double glazing, the main radiator for the house is right next to the thin front door and the boiler is an old rusty piece of crap that takes roughly two hours to heat up the water and radiators and the landlord keeps us on pay-as-you-go utilities so if we don't keep putting money in, everything runs out and shuts off.

how comes? id be challenging that

Because the kitchen is infested with cockroaches - in the cooker (turns out cockroaches don't burn), the fridge, the freezer (turns out cockroaches don't freeze either), in the kettle, the sink and they keep coming out of nowhere. We have to seal off the door with chemicals each night so they don't get into our rooms, but they still come up into the other guys' rooms. My room is the only one that hasn't had roaches in it, probably because I have an extra layer of chemicals soaked into kitchen paper that I stuff into the cracks in the door frame each night.

in that case id definitley be onto your landlord every day until they do something and the council as well as i believe they can take action if the place is infested like that

This thread is titled "Living comfortably/healthy", however you've spent all your £15 on food.

Don't forget rent, utilities, travel expenses,


I'm struggling with £180 a week. For me, it costs weekly:

£100 for rent.
£20 for bus fares.
£30 for utilities (our gas and electric comes to about £100-150 a week between the five of us).
£5 on phone bills.
£25 on food (we have to eat out for as cheap as we can get, our kitchen isn't usable).

I eat on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I don't.

.

Currently only budgeting £15 a week (buying food from Tesco) I thought i'd share my weekly meal plan for anyone who is struggling to live healthily/comfortably on a low budget.

).

i feel the way that I'm eating is much better than my flatmates, they usually spend similar amounts if not more & most of them live on beans on toast for dinner or ready meals

This thread is titled "Living comfortably/healthy", however you've spent all your £15 on food.

Don't forget rent, utilities, travel expenses,


I'm struggling with £180 a week. For me, it costs weekly:

£100 for rent.
£20 for bus fares.
£30 for utilities (our gas and electric comes to about £100-150 a week between the five of us).
£5 on phone bills.
£25 on food (we have to eat out for as cheap as we can get, our kitchen isn't usable).

I eat on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I don't.