Seven ways you can save over £1,500 a year on groceries and bills
Did you know that the average UK household could save money – as much as £1,500 a year or more – on groceries and bills with a few simple changes?
With Office for National Statistics showing food prices still rising by 3.3% year-on-year, and inflation holding at 3.0%, the weekly shop remains one of the biggest pressure points for household budgets.
The average household is leaking hundreds of pounds a year on food that goes in the bin, subscriptions nobody watches and branded products that taste no different from the own-brand version. Financial expert Andrew Wayland, VP Customer and Proposition at drafty.co.uk shares seven ways you can reduce your household budget.
1) Write a meal plan before you set foot in a shop
It may not be the most riveting 15 minutes of anyone’s week (I know, I know), but sitting down with a pen and a rough plan of what you are going to eat does help avoid the temptation to make impulse buys at the supermarket. Waste goes down too, and that is where most of the real money leaks out of a household food budget.
Most people think the price on the shelf is the real cost, but it isn’t. The real drain on your weekly shop is the food you buy and never eat. A meal plan takes the guesswork out of your shop and means you are only buying what you will actually cook. That sounds obvious, but almost nobody does it.
Spending ten minutes on a Sunday evening checking what is already lurking at the back of the fridge? That alone is worth £20 or more a week, because the meal plan more or less writes itself once you know what you have got.
2) Audit your subscriptions and direct debits
Keeping track of spending habits matters just as much as planning your meals. So set aside a bit of time every few months to go through your bank statements properly and see what is actually going out.
It is surprisingly easy for things to slip through the cracks. A streaming service you meant to cancel, an app you used once, a gym membership you stopped going to weeks ago – all quietly billing away in the background. On their own, they do not feel like much, but together they can easily add up to £30 or £40 a month, sometimes more.
Go through your bank statements for the last three months. You would be surprised how many people are spending £30 or £40 a month on things they don’t even remember signing up for. Cancel the lot and that is your weekend away fund sorted.
3) Time your supermarket visits for yellow-sticker reductions and switch to own-brand where you can
Bargain shelves may be tucked away in a quiet corner, but they are definitely worth a look. Some branches start slashing prices at three in the afternoon. Others will not touch the shelves before six, by which point the good stuff has usually gone. It does vary on a store-by-store basis, so it is worth asking.
This works particularly well for meat, fish and bread. The only catch is you have to be willing to cook or freeze what you buy that evening, he notes.
Switching to own-brand is also a great way of saving some extra cash. Tinned tomatoes, pasta, rice, cleaning products: own-brand versions are sitting right there, and I promise you would not know the difference in a blind taste test. Over a year, that is close to £500 back in your pocket.
4) Batch-cook at the start of the week
We have all been there. You get home shattered, you cannot face chopping an onion, and before you know it you have spent £12 on a takeaway that was not even particularly good. The answer is almost embarrassingly obvious. Spend a couple of hours on a Sunday prepping three or four big meals, portion them up and freeze the lot.
Once you have got a chilli or a pasta bake sitting in the freezer ready to go, you just do not bother ordering anything. That’s £8 to £15 you are not spending every time it happens, and it happens more often than people think.
5) Run appliances during off-peak hours where possible
If you are on a time-of-use tariff, shifting when you run things like the washing machine or dishwasher can quietly chip away at your monthly costs.
If your tariff offers cheaper overnight or off-peak rates, it’s worth taking advantage of that where you can. Running a washing machine or dishwasher at the right time might only save you a few pounds a month, but over a year that adds up without you having to change what you are using, just when you are using it.
Pushing a cycle slightly later into the evening or stacking jobs into one off-peak window can make a difference. It’s the kind of change people barely notice day to day, but it is exactly how households claw back £100 here, £200 there over the course of a year.
6) Grow herbs on your windowsill
This is the odd one on the list. Nobody is going to retire on the savings from a basil plant (obviously). But the maths is hard to argue with.
A pack of fresh coriander from the supermarket costs around a quid and goes limp within days. A small pot of the same herb, parked on a sunny windowsill, will keep producing leaves for months. And spring is the perfect time to start. So could it be time to start window box gardening?
7) Use a 24-hour rule for non-essential buys
Not everything that eats into your budget comes from groceries. It is often the small, unplanned extras that creep in during the week. However, here’s a simple rule to try: if it is not essential, leave it for 24 hours.
Most impulse buys feel urgent in the moment, but they rarely are. Give it a day, and a lot of the time you will not bother going back for it. It is a small habit, but one that can quietly cut hundreds of pounds of unnecessary spending over a year.
