Top Tips for Feeding your Family on a Budget

With more Irish families feeling the effects of the European economic crisis, a new struggle they face is how to feed their families healthy, nutritious food on a budget.

The following blog entry is aimed at parents who are struggling to maintain a healthy family diet on a low income. These top tips offer some insight into where savings can be made in the supermarket.

1. Stick to your Shopping List: No matter how tempting some of the special offers are in the supermarket, grocery shopping can become very expensive, very quickly when you are susceptible to impulse purchases. To avoid this, write a shopping list, and make sure you stick to you.

2. Start Cooking Meals from Scratch: It is less expensive to buy ingredients than to spend money on ready-meals and take-outs. The more food you make from scratch the more money you will save, as you can often get more than one meal out of the same ingredients.

3. Eliminate the Junk Food: While everyone enjoys the odd treat from time to time, sweets, crisps, fizzy drinks and other confectionary items can be expensive to buy and offer very little nutritional benefit to you and your family. If you don’t buy the junk food in the supermarket, it won’t be in the house for you and your kids to eat, so try to cut out the junk food: it will save you money and you will feel healthier for it!

4. Buy in Bulk: Often when you are grocery shopping, it is better value to buy a larger bag of potatoes, or to take advantage of 2-for-1 offers on fruit, vegetables and diet staples like meats and bread. If you plan ahead, it is easy to arrange your weekly meals around a core selection of ingredients, and so the same bag of potatoes could last you all week.

5. Cook in Bulk: Cooking in bulk is also a good tip, as any leftovers can be frozen or refrigerated and used at a later date. This means there is always a healthy and nutritious snack in your fridge or freezer; meaning you are less likely to waste money on take-away meals or other junk food, when you are feeling too tired or hungry to cook.

6. Cut out the Luxury Purchases and Expensive Brands: Expensive coffees and chocolates, branded shampoos and conditioners, bottled water; these items are all excessive luxuries to a family on a budget. Many of the unbranded products or supermarket own-brand items have improved in quality and rival the quality of the more expensive brands. Where possible switch to own-brand items, and watch the savings roll in at the cash register.

7. Eat-out less: Cutting back on eating out can make huge savings to your food bill. Restricting restaurant-trips to occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas celebrations has many benefits. Firstly, you will save a lot of money; eating out can be very expensive, especially for a whole family. Secondly, eating out tends to means eating unhealthy, fatty foods and reducing these items in your diet will improve your health long-term. Finally, eating out less means that when you do get to eat out, it becomes more of a treat and your whole family will appreciate it!