Budget: Queensland mum explains how she sticks to a $175 per week grocery spend

Feeding a family of five can be expensive these days and we all have our own tips and tricks to keep our grocery spends down.

It’s also so helpful to learn from others about how they save at the supermarket.

For this week’s Supermarket Sleuths, we speak with Sunshine Coast mother-of-three Eisha about how she and husband Zach keep their food costs down.

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Eisha, 29, tells 9honey she learned some of her frugal ways from her mum.

“She was a single mum so she always had to be savvy with our groceries,” she says.

Eisha build on these lessons over the years and reduced her family’s grocery spend to $175 a week, a huge feat during the current cost-of-living crisis.

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“That includes everything food, pet products, cleaning products, health, hygiene, the lot,” she says.

It was making Aldi her main supermarket that helped her achieve this.

“So I’ve shopped at Aldi for quite a few years now but it became my main supermarket about a year ago because of the cost-of-living crisis,” she says. “I just found it was much cheaper.”

Still, it can be challenging to resist the notorious Special Buys at the centre of the store that can eat away at grocery budgets.

Eisha uses strategies to avoid this.

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”So first thing is I always have a very detailed grocery list,” she says. “I plan that all out before I even hit the store.

“I also try to avoid even browsing the middle aisle. I am a sucker for being pulled into those because there’s so many good deals. But yes, I try and avoid it.”

She also plans out the family meals fortnightly so she knows exactly what to buy.

“So we like to plan one week’s worth of dinners and then I repeat it the following week,” she says, explaining that allows her to make bulk purchases and split them between two dinners.

They also stick to dinners such as “curries that use rice and lots of vegetables” because they can “really bulk them up and make them cheap”.

One of her go-to dinners is a lentil dahl.

“So, a pack of dried lentils, some potatoes, spices and coconut cream,” she shares. “It’s very tasty.”

Leftovers are used up for lunch the next day.

Cooking from scratch has been key.

”We used to buy a lot more packaged foods and now they’re few and far between because of cost-of-living,” she says. “We just stick to a lot of simple recipes and ingredients and make things ourselves.”

How supermarkets have changed over the years

Some of her favourite Aldi products include the baking items such as “flour and chocolate chips” which she uses to make cookies every fortnight rather than buying them pre-made.

On her shopping list most weeks is ”chicken breast and pork mince” as well as rice crackers for her kids.

“Also things like our pet food, we get dog rolls and pet mince … canned products like coconut cream and peas … they’re really good there as well.”

While her two older sons are “pretty easy-going” when it comes to their dinners, her youngest can be a bit picky.

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As a treat Eisha buys Aldi’s apple pies and chocolate Bavarian cheesecake.

Groceries aside, Eisha and Zach also save by reassessing their bills regularly. They also plan major expenses such as kid’s birthdays at the start of the year and save as they go.

“So at the start of the year we reassess how much we want to plan to spend that year on the kids birthdays and then every week when our pay comes in we have automatic transfers that transfer into little separate savings account for when their birthdays and any sort of celebrations roll around,” she says.

“So we currently have probably about 10 different joint accounts for different categories,” she says.

“It just takes the stress out of it. I can pre-plan it, pre-set up all the order transfers and I don’t have to think about it.”

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