Lifestyle

Mark's Blog: Budget Friendly Food Shopping

By Megan 13 Oct 2017

One of the first big shocks I got as a student was how expensive food can be; £3 for cheese! No thank you. Nobody wants to spend a fortune on food shopping, especially if it’s coming out of your SAAS leaving you with no money to go out clubbing!

So here are a few tops tips when it comes to eating and shopping whilst living in university halls:

1. Discount stores like Lidl, and Aldi are not only for buying hammocks and bike pumps! They also sell perfectly good and cheaply priced foodstuffs which can really help protect your budget when at uni
2. Go shopping with flatmates, chances are you don’t need 6 bottles of washing up liquid or bags of sugar, so organise with your flatmates to go shopping together and only buy what you need of the essentials. This not only helps save money but can be a great time to get to know the people you’ll be living with for the next year!
   
   
3. Bulk buy, but in moderation. Sure a bag of 1000 tea bags might look appealing, but chances are you’ll never need that many. Bulk buying can be good for getting discounted prices but can lead to wastage if food goes out of date before you get the chance to eat it.
   
   
4. Say goodbye to take out for a while. That’s not to say that you’ll never ever be ordering food to your flat, but when you’re living off a budget you start to realise how much they cost and how much you need that money. Time to ween yourself off of Chinese food and pizzas to save yourself in the future!
   
   
5. Pasta. Pasta. Pasta. One thing that is exempt from the bulk buy rule is pasta, it is the perfect student food for a few reasons: it lasts a long time, it’s easy to cook, it can eaten with any meal; and best of all it’s cheap!