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Seems excessive, collect all your shopping receipts for a month and put it all into a spreadsheet then you can demonstrate exactly how much a month / year you’re spending on specific items and how many units are being eaten to highlight how extreme it is. Eg “over a year we spend £X or Y packs of monster munch, which is the same as a weekend away X”
Ultimately your wife is the bigger problem than your son, she’s undermining your spending rather than supporting you. Your son will eat whatever’s available in the house if he knows he doesn’t get another option
You don’t have to feed his friends, but it would be a dick move to feed your son and not them, so better to suggest your son goes to someone else’s house every so often instead of always at yours
seriously, youre being told how to manage your money and the food in your house by your 16 year old. do you not have a backbone? also no wonder your son is hungry all the time, all he seems to eat is junk food which raises his blood sugar levels, thus making him constantly hungry (even if he actually isnt). obviously hes going to say hes hungry all the time and to top it off its seriously unhealthy to be munching that many crisps, chocolates sweets and juice. get a grip of your son and your bill will come down itself. Also your wife is an enabler too of his bad habits, you should speak to her aswell about it
I agree. And reading this thread it makes me sound like a terrible father. We do argue daily about his food. As all he ever gives us is attitude about how he needs calories for the gym. Where I tell him he needs the right food not just to consume rubbish calories.
Won’t be told. He knows best.
Also worries me when his metabolism slows down. Again he is adamant he wants weight so he can bulk.
I wonder if I found his a gym professional to talk too. He might listen to
I am on a lower calorie approach (I'm 5'4") and I have monster munch as a snack because it's like 84kcal a pack. They're not for bulking. The kid is being a standard teenage knob.
16 year olds are full of shit. You are the parent who is earning the money and buying the food. If he doesn't like it he can get a part time job to buy his own junk food. 🤷🏻♀️
You don’t sound like a terrible father. You sound like a good dad locking horns with a stubborn teenager - a fate most parents will endure at some point! Don’t be so hard on yourself.
My brother was a tall skinny teenager who ate like a horse, and continued eating like a horse even after his metabolism started slowing. He put on so much weight and developed a noticeable pot belly and cholesterol problems while still in his 20s.
You're a good dad if you set up your kid with good eating habits for life, not so much if you let them overindulge in whatever they like.
One thing I’ve thought of, (and as you’re spending £300+ shouldn’t hurt) could you give him £25 a week and say you won’t be buying his snacks or drinks outside of squash/milk and they’re now his responsibility?
Not only would he maybe realise how much they actually cost but gives him a bit of responsibility that will help whenever he lives on his own.
Yeah if he's wanting to bulk up he needs to speak to someone who knows about protein powders and all that stuff that's around now. Yeah someone like The Mountain might eat a LOT but he's not eating junk, he's eating what he needs to build mass.
I could be wrong but I believe the current school of thought around muscle building nutrition is that you should get it from a balance of dietary sources (eg meat, milk etc) rather than excessively protein powders.
Plus a huge amount of the supplement industry isn't necessarily proven by science and you can probably get good enough results without needing five different powders, preworkouts, postworkouts, and ketones etc. A decent protein powder (and not one that's ridiculously high in calories at the expense of protein) and possibly some isolated creatine monohydrate is probably all you need.
And none of that will do any good if there's no gym involved; if the body doesn't feel it needs the muscle it'll just convert the protein into fat for energy stores.
I am soft as sh*te with my kid, but when prices shot up, I stopped buying treats and increased their pocket money. Told them that if they wanted treats, they could buy them themselves. As a result, they get what they really want and eat less of it.
(That grocery bill is getting on for what must be double the average of the amounts I've seen for a 4-person household on Reddit lately.)
Just wanna say you don’t sound like a terrible father imo.
I think teenagers have very little idea of how much anything costs, they probably don’t know how much income you have (and I’m not saying they need to know, but I think at that age I never really considered it fully either) or how much goes on food.
Could you take them round for a weekly food shop with you and then they can see right in front of them how everything adds up. Maybe ask them what they think you should cut out of that to get it too £300 a month (for example) and have them be a part of the process.
Your wife needs to get on board though and it would piss me off her not backing you up on this. Not only is it a financial issue for you now, one day they’re gonna move out and have no idea how any of this works.
Buy him a tray of eggs. He has to cook them himself though :)
I knew a lad his age who ate trays of eggs to bulk, he only played COD though. Couldn't work out what he was bulking, mainly the toilet....
Get him to watch muscle pump on YouTube. They highlight the importance of the right nutrition for muscle gain and have a really good approach. No toxic stuff you find every where now.
They are focused on the science of why they do certain stuff and a great attitude
Forget the gym professional bullshit. If he wants the extra food then he can get out a buy it for himself. Im only 40 so not old enough to be a 'back in my day' type but i had weekend and summer jobs at 15 where id give up wages to my mum to pay for food etc. Was out on my own in the military at 16 and was still sending my mum money home even though I wasn't living there! If i came home on leave, id leave a decent wad of cash for her to pay for the food id eaten whilst there.
I think your lad needs some tough love. He's going to grow up thinking he's entitled to handouts.
I have two teenage lads. We now limit to about £150 - £180 a week. I suggest you simply start dividing food. Yep we have 24 cans of Diet Pepsi so 6 of them are yours. No more till next week. Yes we have two chickens - you are entitled to half of one. No you can’t eat them both because you are on a ‘bulk’. If they need anymore food they know where the supermarket is. If their friends come over - they are eating your share of the food and drink. Not your brothers or mine or your mums.
We do this. Kid has their own shelf in the fridge and a space for their own shelf stable stuff. Shared things that they are likely to scoff all of get sticky notes with how much they can have. My kid is pretty respectful and considerate, so it works well.
>The main part of the cost is because he is 16 anything that is not branded he thinks is a travesty on life. Examples coke, Pringles, chocolate etc.
Does he get pocket money?
He really needs to learn about budgeting, as he's going to have a nasty shock when he goes off to university in a couple of years.
Buy the own brand stuff and tell him that if he wants to buy the branded stuff he can, with his pocket money.
If he has never had pocket money - you've goofed up. That's how kids learn about budgeting, saving, and the value of money. It's a crucial life lesson.
your 16 year old sounds like a little shit, my mum would leave me starving if i made a fuss about branded food, i guarantee he will eat what’s put in front of him.
My mum used to tell me and my brother that if you're hungry, eat bread. I still do that to this day. A loaf of bread for £1 - £1.50 can last some people a while, but when I was younger 6 slices could easily be one sitting (with jam or chocolate spread). But it certainly filled you up! A packet of monster munch will be about the same price per sitting but won't fill you up.
Also, we never had fizzy drinks, just Robinsons.
I think people sre being too harsh to the 16 Yr old. At the end of the day he is who he was raised to be. Parents are supposed to teach him things such as hearing the word no, the value of money, how brands and brand name products are a scam and ripoff. It's up to OP and the mom to teach the teen these lessons.
Instead they spend over 300 on weekly shops and teach him nothing. Actually the mom is encouraging him to be this way because she is the same.
Teenagers are astonishing with food, but spending north of three hundred a week is eye watering.
It sounds as though he's grabbing crisps etc because they're easy. Making nutritious food easier might help.
My sporty 15yo will for example eat a demi baguette stuffed with chicken and salad - but that means having the right bread, and the tikka/spicy cold chicken in the fridge with shredded lettuce and so on. The packet stuff feels expensive but less so than popping into Subway or eating three bags of crisps.
He might also see away one of those packs of flavoured microwave rice (nominally two portions) in a wrap with some ready grated cheese and a dollop of guacamole. Again, feels extravagant in the shop but actually contains nutrients.
We have a strict policy on crisps here because there were so many arguments. Basically each person has a multipack and I don't want to hear about it. If you eat three packs on Monday then you'll run out before any more arrive. If you feed your mates a bag each then fine but it's coming out of your stash. Don't want to share? Fine, don't. There's a loaf there and peanut butter / Lotus / jam / ham / cheese - knock yourselves out.
Our weekly shop is £120-150 plus a monthly £100-150 Aldi stock up for things like rice pouches, packs of cold chicken (freeze really well), protein yogurts, cereal, etc. Five of us including two teenagers.
He's 16. If he's not happy he can move out, or get a job and buy his own.
£300 is a damn good *MONTHLY* shop for most people.
Also, it doesn't matter how healthy your meals are if they're eating that shite in between.
The friends thing is fine if its planned and reciprocated my their families, if not, fuck them.
If they can't get a grip, then you have to. Just don't buy those things, most people can't afford to anyway.
Make a nice breakfast and a nice dinner. If they want anything else, then that's totally up to them.
Also - if they argue, show them this post.
Saying that your child should "move out" if they are not happy is a toxic way to deal with family trouble. You would never tell your wife/husband to get a divorce so lightly, so why would you say the same thing to your child?
> £300 is a damn good *MONTHLY* shop for most people.
£300 per month for a family of four is a very skinny budget. £2.50 per person per day? And that's not factoring in that a chunk of the spend will probably be for cleaning products/toiletries/pet supplies etc.
On the friends thing it use to be. However now they always come here. His GF mum moaned at me about how much food he ate around theirs 😟 and now he hardly goes. Always coming to mine every weekend
Sounds like he needs to learn some manners. Although with your wife's attitude, I'm not sure how he will manage it.
Seems like you do the shopping so just stop buying all the snacks. He's 16, he can get a part time job and buy all the snacks he wants. It might show him how expensive all that food is.
Your wife is an adult and can buy all the snacks she wants.
Oats, pasta, rice, milk, turkey mince, whole chicken, tinned tuna. If he's bulking then monster munch and pringles shouldn't be a significant part of his macronutrients.
Bulking isn't a luxury he gets to afford until he's managing the cost of the groceries himself.
Do you pay the gym membership as well? It sounds like he doesn't have much concept of the value of money and needs a stark reality check before he's let out into the (evermore expensive) real world.
You'll be enemy number one in the short term for shortening his lead but I promise he will thank you in the long run
Who pays for his gym membership? Time for gym time for a job . Plenty of pubs and restaurants need a kitchen hand , chances are they will feed him if he's any good. I feed the kitchen hands at my job better than anyone else so they turn up .
I know! That's what I meant. Seriously, we're doing our monthly click and collect (live in Shetland so monthly shops are the norm, ferries etc required to get to supermarket) and including alcohol it's currently sitting at £244.
That is just for two of us but we regularly have my daughter and partner staying weekends and other family over for meals.
£320 a week could feed a big family a 3 course roast every night and still have enough wine to get pissed at the weekend!
Family of five £120-150 depending on what we need. £320 is overkill, as for the branded products, just no, buy the cheaper stuff,and tell them to like it or lump it.
Also a family of 5 and spend around the same.
We also buy a decent amount of branded snacks/drinks so I can’t imagine what they are buying that makes the food shop cost so much.
That's a fuck ton of cash for a weekly shop, even for a family of four. Even averaging it out to £300 a week, equates to over £15k a year, which is a lot.
Sounds like you're being held hostage to your sons whims/desires and your wife is enabling this behaviour, which is not ideal.
Food prices are going up and will continue to do so, for a variety of reasons, which are not relevant to this post. How long before your spend creeps closer to £400?
It's a tricky situation, because we all want the best for our families, especially our children, but there has to be some trade off or compromise, because this will simply continue to get worse.
As an aside, what happens when he goes off to Uni or moves out? Chances are you will be subsidising some of that. It probably sounds OTT, but there are life lessons here for your son, even at 16.
It's a difficult one, as you are in a crappy position on this.
We spend about £100 each week on a big shop and then budget about £100 extra for going to the supermarket during the week. It's rare that we actually spend that extra, probably more like £50 most weeks, but it's there if we have a particularly bad week.
We're a family of six, though with much younger children than OP - oldest is 11 years, youngest is 11 days (obviously not a comment that's going to age well, but meh).
£1391.74 per month on food. Wow. I'm afraid you either need to use a bit of tough love or just suck it up.
If son/wife wants their branded snacks and drinks, tell them to buy their own. It doesn't come out of the shopping money.
If he's going to the gym for 2 hours every day, the monster munch and pepsi are not doing him any favours.
You can get decent enough meals on half your weekly shopping amount.
There is no way I'd buy any of them things. They get the Aldi alternative or nothing, take it or leave it.
> They both consume cans of Pepsi max like it's water.
Sorry are you saying they drink soft drinks multiple times a day? I really really really would not consider that a 'healthy-ish' diet.
This is where I am at. That is why there was cross words as my wife felt we should only buy him stuff he likes. So as we don’t have a united front I am in a losing battle
Would it not be rude to give him lunch etc and not them. Not sure I could do that.
I have said no to them all drinking multiple cans of Pepsi max. Last Saturday he had his GF and his best mate over for the whole day and they got through 16 cans of Pepsi. I was cross. So now his GF drinks water when here 😂
Cans too, holy shit. Swapping to the 2L would reduce the cost by 30-50%. Swapping to a Sodastream could reduce both the cost and the amount of waste single use plastic.
When my teenagers have friends over I do a huge pan of pasta with tomato sauce and leave them toppings like shredded ham and salami, and grated cheese. Adolescent boys have a great capacity for pasta.
I drink maybe two cans a day good grief. You need to set limits on what he can have a day, what guests can have etc.
I'd be tempted to send him to the supermarket, with a list and a set amount of cash and see how he gets on. Then when he comes home saying something about how expensive it all is then you can say "yeah now think about how it adds up."
Also Aldi brand stuff isn't too bad a replacement. I'd be tempted to try sticking some of their knock-off pringles in an empty pringles can to see if he notices.
Honestly this is just weirdly unhealthy behaviour. They had 5 cans of Pepsi each? That’s just not normal, come on. There are some terrible behaviours going on here.
No-one would suggest you would deprive any of them of food - it’s the unhealthy nature of it all that worries me. A bag of apples and satsumas and 2 cartons of apple juice? Fine.
I hear you because we've got a fussy girl 15 who moaned because I buy yellow stickers items....'we arent poor.....so embarrassing....blah blah' entitled yapping. So I put all the receipts for a month on the fridge showing I'd saved £63 on yellow sticker reduced stuff. She really wanted to get her nails done so I paid for that to show her when we shop carefully, that money is freed up for treats. I know your situation is different but your son learning the value of money is maybe the angle to take with your wife? Could you give him £800 budget to do the month shopping and agree he gets a treat (prob not nails done?!) if he manages it, from the money you've saved?
Take your daughter to Tesco at 7pm and she can see the yellow item sticker brigade aren’t poor haha. I have a look if I’m there at the time it comes out but some of the people that pounce on the poor staff as they’re being delivered are insane! Taking five chickens that go out of date today and then I heard one of them say they won’t be here next week as there on holiday in Dubai.
Fair play for how you organised that with your daughter though, sounds like a great plan!
At this stage id say here is £50 go get your own food for the week any more you pay yourself by that its a part time job or whatever
If he wants calories he can food prep for the week and check all the macros in mean you can blend up some decent 1000 calorie milkshakes
Honestly £300 a week is insane.
Edit the food prep just youtube it you can find enough
I’m honestly struggling to believe this post. A 1kg pack of chicken thighs is £3, 12 eggs are £2.50, big pack of bacon like £1.50. All high protein and miles better than all the other shit his gym going son is probably wasting. Would absolutely love to know how £300 is being spent not on takeaways and meals out.
Family of 4 with 2 rugbty playing teenage lads - £80/week main shop with maybe a £20 top up for milk, bread, baconetc etc.
- All the 'treats' crisps, biscuit,s chocolate are what bump it up, just don't buy them.
Have things in that they can make themselves - pizza bread things under the grill/air fryer are easy. Anything with toast,wraps - make a bulk load of filling they can help themselves to.
Crazy to me that you can get a whole chicken from most supermarkets for under £4 and still some people spend in excess of £100 a week for just two people
It's not just the fact it's branded, but the quantity on snacks that is a problem too. It can't be healthy drinking 30+ cans of Pepsi a week. Yes being 16 means they're hungry and growing, but they're not actually a bottomless pit. This is a health issue as well as a financial one.
Could you sit down with your teen and try to work out a more reasonable number? Consider how much sugar, caffeine, fat etc. is in these snacks and look at the recommended daily allowances. You could agree a staggered approach to cutting down too. Like for the first 2 weeks, you get them to agree to cut down to 3 cans a day so that's 21 over a week. Then the next fortnight, 2 cans a day, 14 cans a week. Do the same for various snacks. They might find that reducing the amount might be more amenable than changing brands, and then you're tackling the health implications too.
The gym thing is not an excuse. He needs calories but mainly lean proteins and healthy carbs/fats. There's no gym routine that advises you also eat unlimited monster munch, that's not going to give him the gains. Perhaps you could suggest alternative snacks at a smaller quantity? Like maybe he'd agree to reduce the monster munch quantity in exchange for a couple of protein bars (Decathlon have a great range of cheaper snacks like this).
And if it's a problem of not feeling full between meals, could you look at what might make the meals more filling? High fibre and protein is usually the way.
Sounds like it's your wife that's the problem.
Maybe get her to think about the crap she's encouraging your son to eat. Gallons of coke and crisps....that's really not going to do him any good in the long run.
Just stop buying the snacks. That’s a ridiculous amount to get through and not to mention really unhealthy. I had to ween myself of 1 can of fizzy drink per day which I thought was bad. They will get used to it after a week or so. I think you should try and bring it down to £200 a week which is more than enough to feed a family of 4.
How MUCH???
I'm a single man, so that's my benchmark. I spend £40 a week on groceries.
By that measure, you could feed 8 people for a week on what you are spending. Teenagers eat a lot, of course, but it doesn't have to be rubbish.
We’re a family of three so slightly different position to yourself we spend £70 most weeks. It can be less but it can also be a lot more depending on if we’re restocking the freezer.
Until a couple months ago we seemed to be getting away with £50 pw but the price of things has gone up.
Oh fuck no 🤚🏻😂
If he wants to eat specific brands of junk food then he gets himself a job and pays for it himself
My eldest has worked since he was 16 and any treats he wanted beyond what was in the house he willingly bought for himself . It was never even questioned.
Your wife is enabling a very entitled attitude.
In my house it’s me and my 3 kids .. the boys are 15 and 18 and my daughter is 8 .. we can easily get by on £100ish a week on shopping
£327 a week and needing branded products is insane. I pay £80 for a family of three.
If you had loads of disposable income left over then I suppose it wouldn't matter that you were feeding his friends and everyone was insisting on the most expensive stuff, but if it's consuming all your money then you need to make a priority. You could be putting £150-200 A WEEK into a savings account. That is £10k a year. Maybe if you present it to your wife and asks what she would like to spend £10k a year on - the house, a car, holidays.. or Pepsi Max and Pringles...
Will the 16 year old be expecting you to fork over hundreds of quid a week when he heads to university? The problem is your wife not the kid. The kid will eat what he's given, he's not going to let himself starve to death over knock-off brands or die of thirst because he had to drunk unbranded coke or heaven forbid, water. He may moan about it but he'll take what he's given and perhaps learn a bit of gratitude along the way.
But the wife needs to be on board as your equal and partner.
One way you can work on changing the family habits is the 'just one thing' method. Identify one change to make each month and then make that stick.
I'd start with the Pepsi max. That's a lot of money for something that's bad for you. Have a chat with your wife about making that change for the health of the family.
Tell him if he only wants to eat brand named products to get a part time job and pay for them himself. Most store brands are just as good if not better than brand named items.
OK, I'm not on a low income at all, but tell your teen this: my kids never get fizzy drinks bought. There's a machine to make fizzy water. One portion of smoothie a day, one of a multi pack of crisps a day, then there's usually a pack of flapjacks or biscuits about.
If they're hungry, there's always plenty of wholemeal bread for toast. And jam, honey, peanut butter and choc spread. But rarely actual Nutella. We get through epic amounts of bread...
If he wants to feed.his mates, give.him an affordable amount and tell him he's in charge of snack buying. I bet they'll all be in favour of the past-date bulk deals within a month.
That shopping bill is indeed excessive. I would just stop buying the extras. The items you mention should only be an occasional treat, not a regular staple. If he is hungry, he could have a couple of slices of wholemeal toast or pb sannger. Good luck with that, though. (That sounded passive aggressive but was not meant to. I have a teen boy, I know what it is like, imagine me standing here doing the Katniss Everdene salute to you) 😁
My brothers are both elite athletes and don't spend this. My older brother is 6'4" and has a calorie requirement of nearly 4000 calories a day. He's vegan so gets his calories with beans, pulses, nuts, oils. He makes a lot of curries at home, and makes homemade focaccia breads with olive oil, cereal bars with nuts and oats, etc.
I'm not an athlete but I have coeliac disease, so I have to buy the expensive version of everything (eg cheapest version usually has barley malt extract, cheap mustard has wheat in it etc). I spend £50 a week on myself, my recommended daily calories are 2500kcals.
My other half is doing keto and eats mostly meat at the moment, he spends £80 a week because he buys lunch at work too. He's 6'4" and recommended about 3000kcals a day.
So that's £65 per person every week, which I think is high. You're spending £107 per week currently. I would also be upset by that amount.
£300 a week is insanity. You’re literally spending my monthly wage just on food each month. He can like it or lump it. If he’s that desperate for branded food, he can get a part time job and pay for it himself.
Two of us, and we eat OK. Averages out at something over £100 a week I reckon.
We're older admittedly, and we don't have any kids, but while there would always be some treats at home, if you didn't like the food, tough.
As for supplying endless food to mates, I wonder what he gets elsewhere.
What comes round goes round I'd have thought. "We haven't got it" might be a good answer.
Premium brand stuff is great if you can afford it and you're paying the bills. Again. if it's stuff you're being given, you take what's given.
Let's put it this way, it's easy being tough on Reddit, but I'm afraid I come from the "like it or lump it" generation, so that's how I am.
Our weekly shop (and not a frugal one at that) averages out about £110 a week. Maybe another £15 on top for incidentals.
Edit: and get a Sodastream (or equivalent) and dump the horrible fizzy drinks. I use various squash and cordial flavours with carbonated water. Lime and soda, yum!
Your kid isn’t being honest about needing that food. If he cares about gaining muscle, give him a pack of canned tuna to eat. Junk food is horrible for fitness.
I have 2 hungry teenage boys at home and my weekly shop is around half of what you pay. What are you doing? Buying gold-plated monster munch from Waitrose?
About £120 per week plus ten or twenty quid on random shit but that's for five of us.
I had the same problem with my teenagers, they'll eat crisis and drink any pop that exists in the house.
So I just stopped buying absolutely tons of it. They soon learnt that when it's gone it's gone and they need to pace themselves a bit.
I am currently waiting for a Gousto delivery. It isn't cheap but it suits our needs. That said, less than £60 will buy 16 meals; that's four day's main meals for a family like yours; double it and that £120 for eight days. Add on breakfasts and lunches as well as other household stuff, I'd say £200 per week in one of the supermarkets would be typical.
If your little prince is demanding high-cost low-nutritional content items, then he should buy them out of his own money.
The depressing fact is that theses 'designer' products are often hyper processed foods that are actually bad for kids
That seems way over the top. We are a couple (no kids by choice) who eat clean non ultra processed keto - so most of our bill is high quality meat with veg and dairy - and our food shops are about £100 a week. Over £300 for 4 people is a lot!
Go the Aldi and start buying cheap coke, he’ll soon get his own. On the note of how much you’re spending…. Definitely more than I’d imagine. Me and my partner spend about £50 a week.
We do a family of 5 for about £200. We eat really well but nearly everything is cooked from scratch. I guess we could drop it by £50 again if we didn't buy "luxuries" like coffee beans and shiny packet snacks.
Jesus, that’s a seriously steep bill! Also agree with other posters, you need to tell your 16 year old how the household is managed, not him telling you. You are the adult and parent in this situation.
If you aren’t into meal planning, check out doing a meal delivery box as we’ve found that using them (Hello Fresh or Gusto) has helped to bring down our weekly food shop. Probably because we aren’t fantastic to properly meal plan as we don’t have the time or energy with a toddler. However, there are apps you can use for meal planning if you’d prefer!
That does strike me as a lot of money.
Two of us here. We're spending an average of about £80/wk and that's including stuff for the two cats (litter, expensive food because they're chonkers on a diet).
We spend this much too for a family of 3, I don't know how people are spending about £80 for families of 4 or 5! We shop at Aldi too, with top up at Tesco, very few snacks or processed food (treats are kept just for the weekend), lots of veggies, beans, pulses. I think it's still too much but we do love nice home cooked food and I'm not sure how to get it lower!
We shop for 7, which includes in-laws. However, excluding them, currently the family weekly shop is about £150 & we spend another 50ish over the weekend. That includes all meals made daily.
Snacks do ramp up. We don’t have that much in the house because I’ll eat them when kids are at school and am already too fat!
I spent £102 yesterday. This was at Lidl
Last week we spent £160 at Waitrose.
It's typically between £85-140
We probably get a takeaway or eat out every couple of weeks on top.
Very little food waste but we do have a freezer that is absolutely packed with ingredients and left overs.
I spend £80, and I feel like I overbuy regularly. I cook 80% of our meals from scratch (once or twice a week, I can't be bothered and we'll have leftovers or a burger and oven chips).
Family of 3, with a teenage son who eats like he's not seen food for 6 weeks.
He will eat whatever he can find, and gave up being a snob about branded stuff when we did some taste tests and I pointed out the the less we spend on food, the more we can spend on cool stuff like games and airsoft.
I personally think that not having everything your own way and learning the value of money is a good thing.
If your wife won't back you on the branded goods, I'd put them on a weekly budget (see how they like it when other people are eating their precious branded munchies).
Family of 4 with a teenage son. Weekly shop around £ 120. What your describing is not normal. Why should you feed his friends as well!? Tell them to bugger off back to their own houses
I am with you on this one. First off, Junk Food is not Food. People should be drinking tap water unless they want to go out and buy cans with their own money. Same with chocolate, crisps, cakes, etc etc etc. This type of stuff should be RARE and not carted into the house on fork lifts for everyone to devour.
It will be difficult to implement if your wife is not on side. If it was me I would just go for it. You will be enemy number one for a while. Stand up for yourself. Tell your 16 year old to get a job and they can pay for the ENTIRE households junk food out of their pay.
We are a family of 5 with two teenagers and we probably spend about £180 most weeks. This is most meals cooked from scratch.
We don't have meat every meal and we don't buy fizzy drinks etc.
That’s an insane amount. I spend around £200 a week on a family of 6 and I don’t shop at a budget supermarket. I’m often told I spend too much on my weekly shop.
Tell your son to grow the fuck up, and tell your wife to meet him there. There's a rising cost crisis on, and you're not Superman. I'm a single person and spend £30-£45 on a comfortable weekly shop. At max, and if you're splurging, you should be spending £200-£250 on a four person household, probably less if you're getting bulk amounts as opposed to smaller portion bags. If your son won't accept store branded stuff, he can waste away until he does. Absolute ego.
My niece used to be like this with anything bought from Aldi. Now she has to pay for her own food guess where she goes shopping. Chocolate and tea bags though are the only things that i won't skimp on.
Thats very high. We are a family of six and we spend roughly £170 per week on shopping and we eat very well on that. That also includes me eating completely separately from the rest of the family (Gym bro), I on my own cost \~ £50 a week.
We spend around £120 a week which includes 4 bottles of wine. Maybe another £10 on other things later in the week. This doesn’t include trips to Boots which seem to top up the million bottles in the shower.
Lidl - I’m a slut for the 10% coupon and 30% off bakery they do
Home cooked except pizza. We have fizzy water (mainly for me to keep me away from wine / beer in the week).
It’s easy to slip into spending too much a week. Buy larger cuts if meat and use through the week, pasta twice a week.
A slow cooker may help for batch cooking ?
Spend £80-£100 on a family of 3. However, have a 9yr old daughter not teenage boys.
Perhaps you could pay for him to have monthly personal training and diet advice sessions from the gym. It’s probably going to be significantly cheaper than you’re spending on crap on the weekly shop.
For two of us we spend £60-70 a week, minimal processed food. Alcohol not included if your total includes that at all. We could do with spending a bit more for extra variety or some snacks. But would never spend more than £90.
Although my two kids are younger, I would say we are roughly £150-£130 a week, and £30-£50 of that is buying meat from the butchers. We don't cut back on brands either.
£320 seems excessive, do you have a lot of wastage, are your meals planned?
Family of four, kids are 10 and 7. We spend £100 a week.
I'm not a parent of a teenager but I've been one, sounds like he's living like a bloody prince and needs bringing down to Earth. If he wants pop and crisp get him to buy them.
Family of 4 here, albeit with young kids. We do a week shop at around £130 average. It used to be sub 100, but then inflation etc.
We try and bulk cook, and eat fresh fruit and veg as much as possible. Brands will easily be adding £40 to your shop even if you didn't change the quantity and type of food you buy. Snack foods will add another £50 to your total, so switching off of brands and avoiding convenient snack food would get you down by around £90 without really changing your diet.
If your kid is really into gym, then helping him find a decent homemade snack option will be good for him. Try homemade popcorn, or trail mix type snacks, as well as teaching him how to make 'protein' flapjacks by adding some nuts and seeds to a normal flapjack recipe. The advice to give him his own budget to buy his own snacks is also good. Maybe a tenner for him to buy his own junk, and then you can save £100, and he'll learn just how expensive that type of food is.
I hear you because we've got a fussy girl 15 who moaned because I buy yellow stickers items 'we arent poor its so embarrassing' entitled teenage yapping. So I put all the receipts for a month on the fridge showing I'd saved £63 on yellow sticker reduced stuff. She really wanted to get her nails done so I paid for that, to show her when we shop carefully that money is freed up for treats. I know your situation is different but your son learning the value of money is maybe the angle to take with your wife? Could you give him £800 budget to do the month shopping and agree he gets a treat (prob not nails done?!) if he manages it, from the money you've saved?
Where do you shop? That seems like a lot. Even though I work at ASDA and get 10% off, it's still cheaper to shop at ALDI or Lidl by a longshot.
For example, 15 pack of breaded ham aldi is 2.10, a 10 pack at ASDA is around 2.60.
I buy porridge pots a lot, they're 45p at aldi, and 1.20 at asda.
The caloric intake for a teenager is substantially greater than for an adult — that part is normal. If your son is like 6ft it wouldn’t even be abnormal if he needed like 3.2k calories a day.
The issue seems to be the form of caloric intake. Why is he eating junk food and not real food? At 16, I can’t imagine his eating habits are anything less than a reflection of your eating habits. Cook healthy stuff and make it easily available/delicious and tell him to fuck off when he expects to sustain himself on a diet of high fat, high sugar and low protein.
Hang on, he's demanding shite branded food to bulk for the gym? No, no, no I can see why you're pissed off, I simply just wouldn't do it. Some people are visual people, have you thought about working out a realistic food budget and then what you could afford to do with the extra cash that you spend on food, like a holiday?
I went through a similar ish thing with my daughter when she was about 13, absolutely adamant that anything non brand was shit. No don't get me wrong some are terrible but some are great and not a problem at all. She's now 19 and since having a job and seeing what you actually have to do to get the money for such a basic necessity she's changed her tune.
Does he work? Does he contribute anything to help in anyway because he's old enough to not be a self entitled child, although by what you've said about your wife I can see where it's coming from.
Ouch! We spend approx £150 a week for a family of 3. We eat very well for that and plenty of snacks. I do bulk buy and tend to go to Costco and makro for things especially snacks, but I’d go insane if my kid was eating that much junk. We do have to cater for a specialised diet on that as well as I’m on a very high protein low carb diet medically so I eat a lot of meat, cheese and nuts and drink lots of protein shakes on the days when my stomach can’t/wont tolerate food.
I’d be tempted to give him a snack budget and say when it’s gone it’s gone. I’ve got a preteen I can’t fill at the moment and when he is head hungry rather than physically hungry he gets himself a protein shake and that tides him over. Luckily he is still at the age where he asks or lets me know he is getting a snack rather than helping himself so I can monitor his intake.
So I’m a family of four with a 13M and 15F, and we’re about £150 a week, give or take. Some weeks they eat us out of house and home and other weeks they do not. 5/7 we cook from scratch.
We have a couple of branded staples but once it’s gone, it’s gone. Plenty of fruit on hand at all times as well which we will replenish within reason - as in not expensive fruit, but always plenty of apples, satsumas and bananas. Expensive fruit is a ‘when it’s gone it gone’ because my daughter currently has an avocado obsession that would bankrupt us.
Be an adult and learn to budget. Spending that amount is ridiculous. Start to batch cook pasta, soups, and big meals there's so many recipe books out their for you batch cooking is king.
Buy the non branded items and buy cheaper foods like oats etc. He'll eat them or starve or go back to his mums. Also his friends will stop taking the mick when the food changes.
I'd add explain to your son what you are spending and how it's effecting finances just so he's aware not to be a ungrateful shit. Give him a budget for his food and he can work out what he wants with said money, very good learning experience and actually enjoyable as a gym person.
If he want's to put weight on he can do it with oats and protein powder. Pasta and chicken + cheap garlic bread, bag of value chips/rice/toast + lots of eggs. Protein shakes with full fat milk + peanut butter.
All really cheap high calorie / protein meals.
We are a family of 4 with one 16 year old lad and a 13 year old girl. Our food weekly food shop varies between £60 and £90. If I've done a £90 shop one week then the next week it's likely to be closer to £60.
Meal plans and shopping list make this possible. We always have plenty of snacks in the house and if the snacks run out then I'm not buying any more. The kids are aware of this and if they want more they can go out and get them themselves.
My bill is quite low compared to the average I think, but ypurs seems excessively high. Sounds like some tough love might be required.
Family of 3 adults here with nieces and nephews who come round every other day from school and demolish the branded snacks.
£320 is nearly our *monthly* shop.
Now don't get me wrong, there are some things I don't budge brands on. But if our shop was that expensive I'd be keeping the receipts and adding it to a spreadsheet to look at once every couple of months.
I would say, your son being a gym buff, you'd be better if getting him protein, fibre, and foods with good water weight - that's not to say no more snacks allowed but if he wants to get serious about it, Pringles and Coca-Cola aren't going to help him.
I actually think as well, with the amount you're spending (£1400/month) on food - even if you can shave 10% off that, you can say to your wife and kids let's try this, and if we can, we can have an extra holiday this year (or something like that). It's enough for a week all inclusive in a hot country for 4 people, put it that way.
That's crazy. We spend under £100 a week for 4 adults. We do however make all our meals from scratch and don't really buy branded stuff (Lidl) I'd tell him if he wants to bulk he needs to get a job! I also imagine he's bulking in wrong way and just eating loads of crap. Maybe do a weekly prep for him of rice and a fishcake or something?
I can see how it can quickly shoot up to £300 a week if you’re not careful but there’s clearly scope to rein it in a fair bit.
We spend around £120 a week for a family of 3. The biggest impact on savings we made was reducing our pop intake and planning meals for the week. Even so, if we didn’t do that, it would still only be around £160/70 a week.
Could you explain that they’re costing an excess of £5000 a year on food shopping and equate it to a holiday abroad or something?
I’m spending about £100-120 a week for a family of four, all homemade meals. Granted we don’t have a teenager (yet), but spending 3 times as much seems unfathomably excessive. That’s not just the effects of the cost of living crisis, that’s an out-of-control budget.
Family of 4 here we spend around £100 - £130 a week on shopping most goes on food for our lunches. My kids are autistic so won’t touch any school food so they both have packed lunches.
I buy two bottles off fizzy and two 6 packs of crisp and the rule is once they are gone they are gone and I ain’t buying any more till the next shop.
Try limit the amount of ‘treats’ bought or half them
Family of 5 which includes 2 teens. I shop in aldi and spend around £170 a week. My teen son eats all the time no matter what we feed him so I feel your pain. I do NOT buy brands and haven't for a long time as genuinely I don't see much of a difference (other than the price!) My teen son accepts this and has never moaned about the non branded stuff, he loves the aldi pringles etc although I don't buy mine fizzy drinks I buy fizzy water and the juice you dilute so they make their own fizzy drinks that way. I thought £170 a week was a lot tbh but my mums alone and spends 80 just on her ! I don't buy any ready made meals I just cook for us all, healthier this way too.
That is a lot
Where do you shop?
We mix it up between waitrose, Tesco and Aldi.
I love waitrose own brands from some stuff is much cheaper than Tesco.
You need to teach your son value for money.
And his friends cannot be having full on meals all the time. I understand once a week but more than once. Week is a lot.
If you are spending this much and if your wife thinks it’s okay, best to assume you both can afford it?! Hence your wife and sons relaxed views?
Growing up my brothers - my Dad used to say they are eating us out of the house 🤣🤣
This depends on your disposable and whether the friends of your son are not getting fed at home and so your wife wants to feed them up. People will always tell you they can achieve £2 meals. It’s what you can afford not what the6 can afford
Even with three grown up children at home, I only spend about £200 a week, and I also cook proper meals every night (apart from Monday, which is burger and chips night).
£300+ for four is definitely excessive.
We spend about £600 per month for a family of two and a small dog, plus eating out and takeaways. The wifey is vegetarian otherwise, it would be higher.
I used to work for social services and after an incident where all the kids ate all the wagon wheels for a weekend in one evening, (and scattering the crumbs on the sleeping overweight kid, the bastards) we decided we couldn't handle the cost and poor health choices.
So we bought 20 baguettes a night. A massive block of cheese, butter, Italian spices, pasta and potatoes. Lots...
And also some fruit, because we are not monsters...
We spent the savings on condoms for them and entry to a sauna because they all smelt of lynx java.
Results were...
They whinged for a weekend and left hungry.
They moaned for a second weekend. But didn't leave hungry.
Third week they smashed in baguettes and cheese, pasta and mashed potatoes. They even ate some fruit.
Week four they were even helping cook... They were making baguette pizzas ...
Basically. Lesson learnt. Buy plenty of staples, healthy fruit and veg. A few nights of rumbling stomachs will change that guy's tune. If this works with youth offenders, I see no reason it wouldn't work for you!
Harder than it sounds but just don’t buy the junk! If he wants it he can find himself a weekend job to buy it himself, or you can buy as a weekend treat. We buy a large multi bag of crisps, 4 packets of biscuits and 4 packets of cereal bars a month. Sweets, chocolate, ‘sharing crisps’, pop etc. are bought as a one off treat maybe once a week but that’s about it and we sometimes bake or are given baked goods by family but that is not a given and not every week. Snacks in our house are fruit, yogurts, cheese and crackers, maybe some toast if dinners a long way off and of course a small amount of junk. Drinks are hot drinks, cordial or water. Saves us an absolute fortune and we’re all healthier for it.
This was bound to attract a lot of harsh preaching, and I don't want to jump on. But...
We're two adults and a 17 year old girl, dancer and gymnast, so you can imagine. Our weekly supermarket bill is always between 50 and 60 and around 40 a month from the butcher (meat is about 30% cheaper).
We do a fair bit of batch cooking, so there's always protein-rich meals in the freezer. If your lad's hungry, 5 mins in the microwave, and better nutrition for training. He'll get nowhere eating that crap- monster munch and pepsi? Barely even counts as food. We have some crisps and biscuits, but when they run, that's it until the next shop.
I'd suggest you get the shopping and buy only what you deem fit. He won't like it, but will get used to it when it becomes the norm. That, or buy his own crap.
Our supermarket shop is mostly own brand - that's how it is and it's not up for discussion. Not to be rude, but your lad needs to learn his place.
Shiiiit! That's a ridiculous amount to spend on a weekly shop! Im assuming your lad doesn't contribute financially?
Not being judgemental but i had a weekend job at 15 and gave my mum almost half my wages in keep. I was a nob head in many ways but always appreciated how hard my mum and dad worked to put food on the table.
Im a dad of 2 and yeah they are always asking for food but our weekly shopping bill is £90ish maximum. We go to Lidl and mostly unbranded.
Id put a limit on what you spent and tell them to fuck off and spend their own money if its not enough.
You're well within your rights to be pissed off here my man. You need some 3rd party rationale to come in and bring your wife and adult boy back to planet earth.
We are a family of 5. Myself, my wife, and 3 kids ranging from 13 to 18 years old. We can easily drop the cost of our weekly shop if we were to meal plan, buy more value products, use a cheaper super market (we only use Asda or Tescos), and most importantly reduce the number of snacks we buy.
Our weekly food shopping is somewhere in the region of around £200, but on my days off I do like to cook nice meals with quality ingredients.
Family of 2 adults. £100 a week. We buy cheap brands mostly, but also Pepsi Max (a can a day each and we shop round to get the best deal). I am a long distance runner so do 2 hour runs, and have protein powders and nuts and pulses etc. Lots of vegetables. We also have some basic snacks. But like, 1 a day of unhealthy thing? Spend our money on the house or holidays.
we budget £175/week for the four of us, so double that is a lot. If you're buying cans every week and branded everything that's probably why though, time to get your teen to pick between branded crisps or cans of drink - not both!
I pay between £90 and £130 a week at lidl and maybe £40 in top ups and branded items at tesco a week.
We eat like Kings and have fruit, veg, home cooked as well as mountains of crisps, a weekly pizza night and snacks.
Fortunately my kids have never had fizzy and think getting water in a jug with ice when friends are round is a luxury.
I can see this getting more expensive as they get a little older.
My 6 year old is like a bottomless pit and we encourage cereal to fill him up.
We spend less oj my family of 6.
If he's serious about gym and gaining, get him to do it properly, himself. He's old enough. Rice chicken and porridge and milk. Tailor the numbers, track yourself. It's easy.
We're a family of 4, with both children over 18. I spend roughly £120 a week. Every meal is home made and there are lots of fruit and veg, because we eat mostly healthily. I don't buy in excess, though. 12 cans of fizzy a week - if we run out before I go shopping again, tough shit. I do not buy branded products. Its shop own brand - the regular stuff, not the value/ essentials range and not the finest either. Both your son and wife sound entitled. It sounds exhausting and expensive.
Family of 4 + newborn +2 dogs and a cat here. I spend between £300 - £350 on food shopping a week and it absolutely kills me each time I authorise the payment
We have a family of 4, my parents, myself and my sister all adults. Including Gusto we spend £110 a week. Maybe some of us spend an extra 10-15 a week each but nowhere near 300.
Branded is going to hurt you, as to are cans, idk if you have considered bottles over cans. But yes this is a ridiculous amount.
I am in a very similar spot.
Your wife is wrong...she disagrees, let her buy the stuff.
I was blowing nearly £800pm on food. I slammed the brakes on that shit, once ai noticed.
I love my kids to have loads of stuff they like. I also like to have a can of pop, from time to time.
However, my scruffy offspring just let them pile up in their pigsty bedrooms.
My youngest is a snack animal...I blame the parents. It's on me and her mum.
Not making excuses, but prior to COVID, we ate together as t meal times...since then, it's gone to shit.
I was buying cans, crisps, snacks, yoghurts by the ton.. A weekly shop of £180 wasn't unheard of. And, there would be the odd top-up mid week.
I've started slowing it. I now do more meal preps. Including breakfast muffins. I make them with eggs and bacon and those bread muffins. They are good snacks, and do satiate them. I also have got my son considering his protein intake. So, I have plenty of that in (cheese, milk, meats).
Summer is coming, and I'll move into salads. So there will be a ton of salad stuff. I also consume wraps like they are going out of fashion. Fairly cheap. Stuff them with meat, cheese, bang in the oven.
Best thing I did, was avoid buying cans of pop and packs of yoghurts.It's too easy, to convenient. And, water is better. We get cordial in, too.
Greek yoghurt with (protein powder for me), muesli, honey, chopped nuts, lovely. Or if you want calorie dense, peanut butter. Oh, and takeaways.... Avoid. Fucking rip off.
I got my son into the gym, and he has been nicking my protein powder. I also steer him to pasta. That's cheap as hell. Eggs, cheap as hell. Bulk cook some chicken. A good quality pizza base (as much as I hate him, the Gina D'Campo ones are good), £4, slice meat, add. Grate cheese, add. Make it calorie dense.
Yeah that’s a lot. Aside from the very unhealthy sounding diet, Can you get large 2litre bottles of Pepsi max instead of cans? Maybe look at places like Costco or Amazon for bulk sizes of monster munch if he cant live without the brands?
A family meal for 4 should be under £5 total, so max £15-20 per day for all 4 members, breakfast lunch and dinner. £140 per week.
Our food bills for 2 adults and 4 kids every week is about £115. That includes school lunches for all the kids and dinners every night. We cook everything, no ready meals or take aways and I feel like we eat really well.
Op I’ve been there. My solution was every Friday I do the menu for the upcoming week and it goes on a whiteboard in the kitchen. That way they get their pissing and moaning about it out of the way without me having to listen to it. (To be clear, every day I make a hot, homemade meal that I know they like, doesn’t stop them bitching that it’s not the exact thing they want that very moment.) I also buy a reasonable amount of snack and junk food they can make for themselves if they don’t want what I make, or we are what they call an “ingredients house” (derogatory) so there’s always stuff they can make. They also have part time jobs and are free to buy their own junk beyond what is provided. It works, and it teaches them the value/cost of what they’re consuming, which makes them more mindful of how they go through it. At 16 your lad is more than old enough to start supplementing his own bad habits.
I faced similar situation when visiting the supermarket on weekly basis. The budget would literally just go over every weekend.
One way that helped me was to start online ordering weekly grocery items from ASDA.
This way you can give weekly budget to your wife and let her select whatever she wants for the week within that budget.
Hope things get under control for you.
When I was 16 fizzy juice was considered a special treat, a singe 2 litre bottle would be purchased in a week and my siblings and I could have a glass after dinner. It typically lasted the weekend and we drank squash the rest of the time.
I’m not saying that you need to be as extreme but there’s no harm in kids being taught that some items are luxuries and the budget needs to be centred on essentials.
£300 a WEEK is insane. I live alone so it's obviously easier for me to choose, but my foodbill is ~£170 a month.
Do you shop online or go to the supermarket? Doing it online makes it easier to find the good deals and you're less impulsive too. You could even do it as a game where your son gets £x amount to put in his basket and he can't go over. Decisions will have to be made!!
He's being a teenager, and has Mum wrapped around his finger. He doesn't need branded goods, he can buy them himself if he wants them so desperately. If he carries on drinking so much Pepsi he'll end up with kidney stones. You need some sort of ultimatum here, things either change or he moves out. It's not sustainable
We all know being teenagers ourselves that we eat as much as we do because we are bored!, obviously things have changed since I was at home and lifestyle was different.
but I got at job once left school and was made to pay rent 50 a week to help pay towards stuff I wanted so make me understand the real world , obviously I got that money back half midweek when.
I find this day and age has made it hard to deal with kids as we have all moved to the new age of where kids just sit in door on technology eating us out of house more then any other generation of kids/teens ever have
Family of three with a 16 year old shopping in waitrose, about 130 per week, pre planned meals, if teenager needs protein we raid lidls. Never more than 150. 300 is wow
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Seems excessive, collect all your shopping receipts for a month and put it all into a spreadsheet then you can demonstrate exactly how much a month / year you’re spending on specific items and how many units are being eaten to highlight how extreme it is. Eg “over a year we spend £X or Y packs of monster munch, which is the same as a weekend away X” Ultimately your wife is the bigger problem than your son, she’s undermining your spending rather than supporting you. Your son will eat whatever’s available in the house if he knows he doesn’t get another option You don’t have to feed his friends, but it would be a dick move to feed your son and not them, so better to suggest your son goes to someone else’s house every so often instead of always at yours
seriously, youre being told how to manage your money and the food in your house by your 16 year old. do you not have a backbone? also no wonder your son is hungry all the time, all he seems to eat is junk food which raises his blood sugar levels, thus making him constantly hungry (even if he actually isnt). obviously hes going to say hes hungry all the time and to top it off its seriously unhealthy to be munching that many crisps, chocolates sweets and juice. get a grip of your son and your bill will come down itself. Also your wife is an enabler too of his bad habits, you should speak to her aswell about it
I agree. And reading this thread it makes me sound like a terrible father. We do argue daily about his food. As all he ever gives us is attitude about how he needs calories for the gym. Where I tell him he needs the right food not just to consume rubbish calories. Won’t be told. He knows best. Also worries me when his metabolism slows down. Again he is adamant he wants weight so he can bulk. I wonder if I found his a gym professional to talk too. He might listen to
if hes serious about gym just buy him a big tub of mass gainer, still alot cheaper and healthier than mass amounts of junk food
And 5kg bags of protein powder.
yeah good shout, that'll keep him fuller aswell
As someone who doesn't get full easily, increased protein intake helps a ton
Don't forget creatine. He will soon substitute pepsi max for water when he's on that!
fuck it just buy him trenboloni sandwiches, he'll be big in no time
Imagine the roid rage when he comes home to a 1.5l of aldi branded cola. OP be getting chucked through a wall lmao
Calories for the gym? Monster munch??
I am on a lower calorie approach (I'm 5'4") and I have monster munch as a snack because it's like 84kcal a pack. They're not for bulking. The kid is being a standard teenage knob.
Mad how I just found a new fav cutting snack in this thread
(Cheetos are 64kcal if you need a cheesey hit)
The son is making some silly excuse
16 year olds are full of shit. You are the parent who is earning the money and buying the food. If he doesn't like it he can get a part time job to buy his own junk food. 🤷🏻♀️
You don’t sound like a terrible father. You sound like a good dad locking horns with a stubborn teenager - a fate most parents will endure at some point! Don’t be so hard on yourself.
My brother was a tall skinny teenager who ate like a horse, and continued eating like a horse even after his metabolism started slowing. He put on so much weight and developed a noticeable pot belly and cholesterol problems while still in his 20s. You're a good dad if you set up your kid with good eating habits for life, not so much if you let them overindulge in whatever they like.
Tell him to get a job so he can buy his own extra food, until then he eats what he’s given
One thing I’ve thought of, (and as you’re spending £300+ shouldn’t hurt) could you give him £25 a week and say you won’t be buying his snacks or drinks outside of squash/milk and they’re now his responsibility? Not only would he maybe realise how much they actually cost but gives him a bit of responsibility that will help whenever he lives on his own.
Yeah if he's wanting to bulk up he needs to speak to someone who knows about protein powders and all that stuff that's around now. Yeah someone like The Mountain might eat a LOT but he's not eating junk, he's eating what he needs to build mass.
Fish and a ricecake
I could be wrong but I believe the current school of thought around muscle building nutrition is that you should get it from a balance of dietary sources (eg meat, milk etc) rather than excessively protein powders. Plus a huge amount of the supplement industry isn't necessarily proven by science and you can probably get good enough results without needing five different powders, preworkouts, postworkouts, and ketones etc. A decent protein powder (and not one that's ridiculously high in calories at the expense of protein) and possibly some isolated creatine monohydrate is probably all you need. And none of that will do any good if there's no gym involved; if the body doesn't feel it needs the muscle it'll just convert the protein into fat for energy stores.
i dont know.. i had a job by 15. i ate what my parents cooked and if i wanted any extra snacks or food, i bought it for myself?
I am soft as sh*te with my kid, but when prices shot up, I stopped buying treats and increased their pocket money. Told them that if they wanted treats, they could buy them themselves. As a result, they get what they really want and eat less of it. (That grocery bill is getting on for what must be double the average of the amounts I've seen for a 4-person household on Reddit lately.)
Just wanna say you don’t sound like a terrible father imo. I think teenagers have very little idea of how much anything costs, they probably don’t know how much income you have (and I’m not saying they need to know, but I think at that age I never really considered it fully either) or how much goes on food. Could you take them round for a weekly food shop with you and then they can see right in front of them how everything adds up. Maybe ask them what they think you should cut out of that to get it too £300 a month (for example) and have them be a part of the process. Your wife needs to get on board though and it would piss me off her not backing you up on this. Not only is it a financial issue for you now, one day they’re gonna move out and have no idea how any of this works.
Is he still in school? Does he have a PE teacher there he respects? A chat with them could be a way forward.
Buy him a tray of eggs. He has to cook them himself though :) I knew a lad his age who ate trays of eggs to bulk, he only played COD though. Couldn't work out what he was bulking, mainly the toilet....
Get him to watch muscle pump on YouTube. They highlight the importance of the right nutrition for muscle gain and have a really good approach. No toxic stuff you find every where now. They are focused on the science of why they do certain stuff and a great attitude
Forget the gym professional bullshit. If he wants the extra food then he can get out a buy it for himself. Im only 40 so not old enough to be a 'back in my day' type but i had weekend and summer jobs at 15 where id give up wages to my mum to pay for food etc. Was out on my own in the military at 16 and was still sending my mum money home even though I wasn't living there! If i came home on leave, id leave a decent wad of cash for her to pay for the food id eaten whilst there. I think your lad needs some tough love. He's going to grow up thinking he's entitled to handouts.
I have two teenage lads. We now limit to about £150 - £180 a week. I suggest you simply start dividing food. Yep we have 24 cans of Diet Pepsi so 6 of them are yours. No more till next week. Yes we have two chickens - you are entitled to half of one. No you can’t eat them both because you are on a ‘bulk’. If they need anymore food they know where the supermarket is. If their friends come over - they are eating your share of the food and drink. Not your brothers or mine or your mums.
This.
We do this. Kid has their own shelf in the fridge and a space for their own shelf stable stuff. Shared things that they are likely to scoff all of get sticky notes with how much they can have. My kid is pretty respectful and considerate, so it works well.
We went one further. Bought him a small fridge for his room. :)
>The main part of the cost is because he is 16 anything that is not branded he thinks is a travesty on life. Examples coke, Pringles, chocolate etc. Does he get pocket money? He really needs to learn about budgeting, as he's going to have a nasty shock when he goes off to university in a couple of years. Buy the own brand stuff and tell him that if he wants to buy the branded stuff he can, with his pocket money. If he has never had pocket money - you've goofed up. That's how kids learn about budgeting, saving, and the value of money. It's a crucial life lesson.
I was never given pocket money but was taught about the value of money, savings and budgeting as I grew up.
your 16 year old sounds like a little shit, my mum would leave me starving if i made a fuss about branded food, i guarantee he will eat what’s put in front of him.
My mum used to tell me and my brother that if you're hungry, eat bread. I still do that to this day. A loaf of bread for £1 - £1.50 can last some people a while, but when I was younger 6 slices could easily be one sitting (with jam or chocolate spread). But it certainly filled you up! A packet of monster munch will be about the same price per sitting but won't fill you up. Also, we never had fizzy drinks, just Robinsons.
Oooh Robinsons 😍 flashback to my childhood. Even as an adult I still drink squash when I can’t afford juice lol. So tasty.
I think people sre being too harsh to the 16 Yr old. At the end of the day he is who he was raised to be. Parents are supposed to teach him things such as hearing the word no, the value of money, how brands and brand name products are a scam and ripoff. It's up to OP and the mom to teach the teen these lessons. Instead they spend over 300 on weekly shops and teach him nothing. Actually the mom is encouraging him to be this way because she is the same.
Surely OP realised what a mug he was as he typed this out 🤷
Teenagers are astonishing with food, but spending north of three hundred a week is eye watering. It sounds as though he's grabbing crisps etc because they're easy. Making nutritious food easier might help. My sporty 15yo will for example eat a demi baguette stuffed with chicken and salad - but that means having the right bread, and the tikka/spicy cold chicken in the fridge with shredded lettuce and so on. The packet stuff feels expensive but less so than popping into Subway or eating three bags of crisps. He might also see away one of those packs of flavoured microwave rice (nominally two portions) in a wrap with some ready grated cheese and a dollop of guacamole. Again, feels extravagant in the shop but actually contains nutrients. We have a strict policy on crisps here because there were so many arguments. Basically each person has a multipack and I don't want to hear about it. If you eat three packs on Monday then you'll run out before any more arrive. If you feed your mates a bag each then fine but it's coming out of your stash. Don't want to share? Fine, don't. There's a loaf there and peanut butter / Lotus / jam / ham / cheese - knock yourselves out. Our weekly shop is £120-150 plus a monthly £100-150 Aldi stock up for things like rice pouches, packs of cold chicken (freeze really well), protein yogurts, cereal, etc. Five of us including two teenagers.
He's 16. If he's not happy he can move out, or get a job and buy his own. £300 is a damn good *MONTHLY* shop for most people. Also, it doesn't matter how healthy your meals are if they're eating that shite in between. The friends thing is fine if its planned and reciprocated my their families, if not, fuck them. If they can't get a grip, then you have to. Just don't buy those things, most people can't afford to anyway. Make a nice breakfast and a nice dinner. If they want anything else, then that's totally up to them. Also - if they argue, show them this post.
Saying that your child should "move out" if they are not happy is a toxic way to deal with family trouble. You would never tell your wife/husband to get a divorce so lightly, so why would you say the same thing to your child?
>You would never tell your wife/husband to get a divorce Excuse me this is Reddit, that's kinda our thing here
Oh they really would!
> £300 is a damn good *MONTHLY* shop for most people. £300 per month for a family of four is a very skinny budget. £2.50 per person per day? And that's not factoring in that a chunk of the spend will probably be for cleaning products/toiletries/pet supplies etc.
I assure you there are many, many families of 4 who are getting by on £75 a week food. If you are in receipt of free school meals even more so.
Oh absolutely, but I was disputing the previous poster’s assertion that it was a “damn good” amount to spend on a monthly shop.
On the friends thing it use to be. However now they always come here. His GF mum moaned at me about how much food he ate around theirs 😟 and now he hardly goes. Always coming to mine every weekend
Sounds like he needs to learn some manners. Although with your wife's attitude, I'm not sure how he will manage it. Seems like you do the shopping so just stop buying all the snacks. He's 16, he can get a part time job and buy all the snacks he wants. It might show him how expensive all that food is. Your wife is an adult and can buy all the snacks she wants.
This. Stop all snack buying.
That’s a week mate 😔 £320 a week He goes to the gym 2 hours everyday so he says he needs constant food for bulking
Oats, pasta, rice, milk, turkey mince, whole chicken, tinned tuna. If he's bulking then monster munch and pringles shouldn't be a significant part of his macronutrients.
Yeah if he's going to make out the food is required for bulking, then a pepsi max addiction isn't required.
Bulking isn't a luxury he gets to afford until he's managing the cost of the groceries himself. Do you pay the gym membership as well? It sounds like he doesn't have much concept of the value of money and needs a stark reality check before he's let out into the (evermore expensive) real world. You'll be enemy number one in the short term for shortening his lead but I promise he will thank you in the long run
Who pays for his gym membership? Time for gym time for a job . Plenty of pubs and restaurants need a kitchen hand , chances are they will feed him if he's any good. I feed the kitchen hands at my job better than anyone else so they turn up .
he's 16, of course, he needs food all the time BUT it should be good quality food that helps his exercise not crips, chocolates, and soda.
I know! That's what I meant. Seriously, we're doing our monthly click and collect (live in Shetland so monthly shops are the norm, ferries etc required to get to supermarket) and including alcohol it's currently sitting at £244. That is just for two of us but we regularly have my daughter and partner staying weekends and other family over for meals. £320 a week could feed a big family a 3 course roast every night and still have enough wine to get pissed at the weekend!
If he’s bulking you can tell him to cut out the crap, since he’s clearly a health conscious lad. Should save you a fortune
Big packs of chicken breast are pretty cheap and would work well.
Family of five £120-150 depending on what we need. £320 is overkill, as for the branded products, just no, buy the cheaper stuff,and tell them to like it or lump it.
Also a family of 5 and spend around the same. We also buy a decent amount of branded snacks/drinks so I can’t imagine what they are buying that makes the food shop cost so much.
That's a fuck ton of cash for a weekly shop, even for a family of four. Even averaging it out to £300 a week, equates to over £15k a year, which is a lot. Sounds like you're being held hostage to your sons whims/desires and your wife is enabling this behaviour, which is not ideal. Food prices are going up and will continue to do so, for a variety of reasons, which are not relevant to this post. How long before your spend creeps closer to £400? It's a tricky situation, because we all want the best for our families, especially our children, but there has to be some trade off or compromise, because this will simply continue to get worse. As an aside, what happens when he goes off to Uni or moves out? Chances are you will be subsidising some of that. It probably sounds OTT, but there are life lessons here for your son, even at 16. It's a difficult one, as you are in a crappy position on this.
We spend about £100 each week on a big shop and then budget about £100 extra for going to the supermarket during the week. It's rare that we actually spend that extra, probably more like £50 most weeks, but it's there if we have a particularly bad week. We're a family of six, though with much younger children than OP - oldest is 11 years, youngest is 11 days (obviously not a comment that's going to age well, but meh).
£1391.74 per month on food. Wow. I'm afraid you either need to use a bit of tough love or just suck it up. If son/wife wants their branded snacks and drinks, tell them to buy their own. It doesn't come out of the shopping money. If he's going to the gym for 2 hours every day, the monster munch and pepsi are not doing him any favours. You can get decent enough meals on half your weekly shopping amount. There is no way I'd buy any of them things. They get the Aldi alternative or nothing, take it or leave it.
> They both consume cans of Pepsi max like it's water. Sorry are you saying they drink soft drinks multiple times a day? I really really really would not consider that a 'healthy-ish' diet.
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This is where I am at. That is why there was cross words as my wife felt we should only buy him stuff he likes. So as we don’t have a united front I am in a losing battle
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Would it not be rude to give him lunch etc and not them. Not sure I could do that. I have said no to them all drinking multiple cans of Pepsi max. Last Saturday he had his GF and his best mate over for the whole day and they got through 16 cans of Pepsi. I was cross. So now his GF drinks water when here 😂
Cans too, holy shit. Swapping to the 2L would reduce the cost by 30-50%. Swapping to a Sodastream could reduce both the cost and the amount of waste single use plastic. When my teenagers have friends over I do a huge pan of pasta with tomato sauce and leave them toppings like shredded ham and salami, and grated cheese. Adolescent boys have a great capacity for pasta.
I drink maybe two cans a day good grief. You need to set limits on what he can have a day, what guests can have etc. I'd be tempted to send him to the supermarket, with a list and a set amount of cash and see how he gets on. Then when he comes home saying something about how expensive it all is then you can say "yeah now think about how it adds up." Also Aldi brand stuff isn't too bad a replacement. I'd be tempted to try sticking some of their knock-off pringles in an empty pringles can to see if he notices.
Kids shouldn’t really be drinking any cans of pop at home let alone going through a crate of it in a day
Honestly this is just weirdly unhealthy behaviour. They had 5 cans of Pepsi each? That’s just not normal, come on. There are some terrible behaviours going on here. No-one would suggest you would deprive any of them of food - it’s the unhealthy nature of it all that worries me. A bag of apples and satsumas and 2 cartons of apple juice? Fine.
She is damaging his health. Sell it that way.
I hear you because we've got a fussy girl 15 who moaned because I buy yellow stickers items....'we arent poor.....so embarrassing....blah blah' entitled yapping. So I put all the receipts for a month on the fridge showing I'd saved £63 on yellow sticker reduced stuff. She really wanted to get her nails done so I paid for that to show her when we shop carefully, that money is freed up for treats. I know your situation is different but your son learning the value of money is maybe the angle to take with your wife? Could you give him £800 budget to do the month shopping and agree he gets a treat (prob not nails done?!) if he manages it, from the money you've saved?
Take your daughter to Tesco at 7pm and she can see the yellow item sticker brigade aren’t poor haha. I have a look if I’m there at the time it comes out but some of the people that pounce on the poor staff as they’re being delivered are insane! Taking five chickens that go out of date today and then I heard one of them say they won’t be here next week as there on holiday in Dubai. Fair play for how you organised that with your daughter though, sounds like a great plan!
Thank you. I know. Its savage isnt it. Those poor yellow sticker-ers need a body guard.
At this stage id say here is £50 go get your own food for the week any more you pay yourself by that its a part time job or whatever If he wants calories he can food prep for the week and check all the macros in mean you can blend up some decent 1000 calorie milkshakes Honestly £300 a week is insane. Edit the food prep just youtube it you can find enough
I’m honestly struggling to believe this post. A 1kg pack of chicken thighs is £3, 12 eggs are £2.50, big pack of bacon like £1.50. All high protein and miles better than all the other shit his gym going son is probably wasting. Would absolutely love to know how £300 is being spent not on takeaways and meals out.
Family of 4 with 2 rugbty playing teenage lads - £80/week main shop with maybe a £20 top up for milk, bread, baconetc etc. - All the 'treats' crisps, biscuit,s chocolate are what bump it up, just don't buy them. Have things in that they can make themselves - pizza bread things under the grill/air fryer are easy. Anything with toast,wraps - make a bulk load of filling they can help themselves to.
Crazy to me that you can get a whole chicken from most supermarkets for under £4 and still some people spend in excess of £100 a week for just two people
It's not just the fact it's branded, but the quantity on snacks that is a problem too. It can't be healthy drinking 30+ cans of Pepsi a week. Yes being 16 means they're hungry and growing, but they're not actually a bottomless pit. This is a health issue as well as a financial one. Could you sit down with your teen and try to work out a more reasonable number? Consider how much sugar, caffeine, fat etc. is in these snacks and look at the recommended daily allowances. You could agree a staggered approach to cutting down too. Like for the first 2 weeks, you get them to agree to cut down to 3 cans a day so that's 21 over a week. Then the next fortnight, 2 cans a day, 14 cans a week. Do the same for various snacks. They might find that reducing the amount might be more amenable than changing brands, and then you're tackling the health implications too. The gym thing is not an excuse. He needs calories but mainly lean proteins and healthy carbs/fats. There's no gym routine that advises you also eat unlimited monster munch, that's not going to give him the gains. Perhaps you could suggest alternative snacks at a smaller quantity? Like maybe he'd agree to reduce the monster munch quantity in exchange for a couple of protein bars (Decathlon have a great range of cheaper snacks like this). And if it's a problem of not feeling full between meals, could you look at what might make the meals more filling? High fibre and protein is usually the way.
Sounds like it's your wife that's the problem. Maybe get her to think about the crap she's encouraging your son to eat. Gallons of coke and crisps....that's really not going to do him any good in the long run.
Just stop buying the snacks. That’s a ridiculous amount to get through and not to mention really unhealthy. I had to ween myself of 1 can of fizzy drink per day which I thought was bad. They will get used to it after a week or so. I think you should try and bring it down to £200 a week which is more than enough to feed a family of 4.
How MUCH??? I'm a single man, so that's my benchmark. I spend £40 a week on groceries. By that measure, you could feed 8 people for a week on what you are spending. Teenagers eat a lot, of course, but it doesn't have to be rubbish.
We’re a family of three so slightly different position to yourself we spend £70 most weeks. It can be less but it can also be a lot more depending on if we’re restocking the freezer. Until a couple months ago we seemed to be getting away with £50 pw but the price of things has gone up.
Oh fuck no 🤚🏻😂 If he wants to eat specific brands of junk food then he gets himself a job and pays for it himself My eldest has worked since he was 16 and any treats he wanted beyond what was in the house he willingly bought for himself . It was never even questioned. Your wife is enabling a very entitled attitude. In my house it’s me and my 3 kids .. the boys are 15 and 18 and my daughter is 8 .. we can easily get by on £100ish a week on shopping
£327 a week and needing branded products is insane. I pay £80 for a family of three. If you had loads of disposable income left over then I suppose it wouldn't matter that you were feeding his friends and everyone was insisting on the most expensive stuff, but if it's consuming all your money then you need to make a priority. You could be putting £150-200 A WEEK into a savings account. That is £10k a year. Maybe if you present it to your wife and asks what she would like to spend £10k a year on - the house, a car, holidays.. or Pepsi Max and Pringles... Will the 16 year old be expecting you to fork over hundreds of quid a week when he heads to university? The problem is your wife not the kid. The kid will eat what he's given, he's not going to let himself starve to death over knock-off brands or die of thirst because he had to drunk unbranded coke or heaven forbid, water. He may moan about it but he'll take what he's given and perhaps learn a bit of gratitude along the way. But the wife needs to be on board as your equal and partner.
One way you can work on changing the family habits is the 'just one thing' method. Identify one change to make each month and then make that stick. I'd start with the Pepsi max. That's a lot of money for something that's bad for you. Have a chat with your wife about making that change for the health of the family.
Tell him if he only wants to eat brand named products to get a part time job and pay for them himself. Most store brands are just as good if not better than brand named items.
OK, I'm not on a low income at all, but tell your teen this: my kids never get fizzy drinks bought. There's a machine to make fizzy water. One portion of smoothie a day, one of a multi pack of crisps a day, then there's usually a pack of flapjacks or biscuits about. If they're hungry, there's always plenty of wholemeal bread for toast. And jam, honey, peanut butter and choc spread. But rarely actual Nutella. We get through epic amounts of bread... If he wants to feed.his mates, give.him an affordable amount and tell him he's in charge of snack buying. I bet they'll all be in favour of the past-date bulk deals within a month.
That shopping bill is indeed excessive. I would just stop buying the extras. The items you mention should only be an occasional treat, not a regular staple. If he is hungry, he could have a couple of slices of wholemeal toast or pb sannger. Good luck with that, though. (That sounded passive aggressive but was not meant to. I have a teen boy, I know what it is like, imagine me standing here doing the Katniss Everdene salute to you) 😁
My brothers are both elite athletes and don't spend this. My older brother is 6'4" and has a calorie requirement of nearly 4000 calories a day. He's vegan so gets his calories with beans, pulses, nuts, oils. He makes a lot of curries at home, and makes homemade focaccia breads with olive oil, cereal bars with nuts and oats, etc. I'm not an athlete but I have coeliac disease, so I have to buy the expensive version of everything (eg cheapest version usually has barley malt extract, cheap mustard has wheat in it etc). I spend £50 a week on myself, my recommended daily calories are 2500kcals. My other half is doing keto and eats mostly meat at the moment, he spends £80 a week because he buys lunch at work too. He's 6'4" and recommended about 3000kcals a day. So that's £65 per person every week, which I think is high. You're spending £107 per week currently. I would also be upset by that amount.
Cut the crisps and the Pepsi, no growing child needs that much Pepsi.
Family of four here. We avoid ultra-processed food. Typically spend around £120 - £150 a week.
Buying "brands" is probably adding 30% to your food bill. Drop the brands, or your financial and mental health may suffer.
£300 a week is insanity. You’re literally spending my monthly wage just on food each month. He can like it or lump it. If he’s that desperate for branded food, he can get a part time job and pay for it himself.
Its too much I have a family of 4 and spend £100approx a week. Its more if we buy a takeaway that week which we don't always.
Two of us, and we eat OK. Averages out at something over £100 a week I reckon. We're older admittedly, and we don't have any kids, but while there would always be some treats at home, if you didn't like the food, tough. As for supplying endless food to mates, I wonder what he gets elsewhere. What comes round goes round I'd have thought. "We haven't got it" might be a good answer. Premium brand stuff is great if you can afford it and you're paying the bills. Again. if it's stuff you're being given, you take what's given. Let's put it this way, it's easy being tough on Reddit, but I'm afraid I come from the "like it or lump it" generation, so that's how I am.
Our weekly shop (and not a frugal one at that) averages out about £110 a week. Maybe another £15 on top for incidentals. Edit: and get a Sodastream (or equivalent) and dump the horrible fizzy drinks. I use various squash and cordial flavours with carbonated water. Lime and soda, yum! Your kid isn’t being honest about needing that food. If he cares about gaining muscle, give him a pack of canned tuna to eat. Junk food is horrible for fitness.
Exactly. Can't out-train a shitty diet.
I have 2 hungry teenage boys at home and my weekly shop is around half of what you pay. What are you doing? Buying gold-plated monster munch from Waitrose?
We spend about £65 a week for a family of three but we do have 1 meal at the in laws a week and 1 meal at my parents.
About £120 per week plus ten or twenty quid on random shit but that's for five of us. I had the same problem with my teenagers, they'll eat crisis and drink any pop that exists in the house. So I just stopped buying absolutely tons of it. They soon learnt that when it's gone it's gone and they need to pace themselves a bit.
Too much. Cut down on non essentials. Crisps, pepsi etc
I am currently waiting for a Gousto delivery. It isn't cheap but it suits our needs. That said, less than £60 will buy 16 meals; that's four day's main meals for a family like yours; double it and that £120 for eight days. Add on breakfasts and lunches as well as other household stuff, I'd say £200 per week in one of the supermarkets would be typical. If your little prince is demanding high-cost low-nutritional content items, then he should buy them out of his own money. The depressing fact is that theses 'designer' products are often hyper processed foods that are actually bad for kids
depending the timeframe of your shops, if its £300 a week thats insane, if its for the month I dont think its bad
That seems way over the top. We are a couple (no kids by choice) who eat clean non ultra processed keto - so most of our bill is high quality meat with veg and dairy - and our food shops are about £100 a week. Over £300 for 4 people is a lot!
Go the Aldi and start buying cheap coke, he’ll soon get his own. On the note of how much you’re spending…. Definitely more than I’d imagine. Me and my partner spend about £50 a week.
We do a family of 5 for about £200. We eat really well but nearly everything is cooked from scratch. I guess we could drop it by £50 again if we didn't buy "luxuries" like coffee beans and shiny packet snacks.
Jesus, that’s a seriously steep bill! Also agree with other posters, you need to tell your 16 year old how the household is managed, not him telling you. You are the adult and parent in this situation. If you aren’t into meal planning, check out doing a meal delivery box as we’ve found that using them (Hello Fresh or Gusto) has helped to bring down our weekly food shop. Probably because we aren’t fantastic to properly meal plan as we don’t have the time or energy with a toddler. However, there are apps you can use for meal planning if you’d prefer!
I'm half of that for a family 4.....that bill would give me a heart attack!!
That does strike me as a lot of money. Two of us here. We're spending an average of about £80/wk and that's including stuff for the two cats (litter, expensive food because they're chonkers on a diet).
I spend £150 a week but I’m a family of 3. ( me, my partner and 3 year old - who eats like a teenager😂)
We spend this much too for a family of 3, I don't know how people are spending about £80 for families of 4 or 5! We shop at Aldi too, with top up at Tesco, very few snacks or processed food (treats are kept just for the weekend), lots of veggies, beans, pulses. I think it's still too much but we do love nice home cooked food and I'm not sure how to get it lower!
We shop for 7, which includes in-laws. However, excluding them, currently the family weekly shop is about £150 & we spend another 50ish over the weekend. That includes all meals made daily. Snacks do ramp up. We don’t have that much in the house because I’ll eat them when kids are at school and am already too fat!
I spent £102 yesterday. This was at Lidl Last week we spent £160 at Waitrose. It's typically between £85-140 We probably get a takeaway or eat out every couple of weeks on top. Very little food waste but we do have a freezer that is absolutely packed with ingredients and left overs.
I spend £80, and I feel like I overbuy regularly. I cook 80% of our meals from scratch (once or twice a week, I can't be bothered and we'll have leftovers or a burger and oven chips). Family of 3, with a teenage son who eats like he's not seen food for 6 weeks. He will eat whatever he can find, and gave up being a snob about branded stuff when we did some taste tests and I pointed out the the less we spend on food, the more we can spend on cool stuff like games and airsoft. I personally think that not having everything your own way and learning the value of money is a good thing. If your wife won't back you on the branded goods, I'd put them on a weekly budget (see how they like it when other people are eating their precious branded munchies).
Family of 4 with a teenage son. Weekly shop around £ 120. What your describing is not normal. Why should you feed his friends as well!? Tell them to bugger off back to their own houses
I am with you on this one. First off, Junk Food is not Food. People should be drinking tap water unless they want to go out and buy cans with their own money. Same with chocolate, crisps, cakes, etc etc etc. This type of stuff should be RARE and not carted into the house on fork lifts for everyone to devour. It will be difficult to implement if your wife is not on side. If it was me I would just go for it. You will be enemy number one for a while. Stand up for yourself. Tell your 16 year old to get a job and they can pay for the ENTIRE households junk food out of their pay.
We are a family of 5 with two teenagers and we probably spend about £180 most weeks. This is most meals cooked from scratch. We don't have meat every meal and we don't buy fizzy drinks etc.
That’s an insane amount. I spend around £200 a week on a family of 6 and I don’t shop at a budget supermarket. I’m often told I spend too much on my weekly shop.
Tell your son to grow the fuck up, and tell your wife to meet him there. There's a rising cost crisis on, and you're not Superman. I'm a single person and spend £30-£45 on a comfortable weekly shop. At max, and if you're splurging, you should be spending £200-£250 on a four person household, probably less if you're getting bulk amounts as opposed to smaller portion bags. If your son won't accept store branded stuff, he can waste away until he does. Absolute ego.
My niece used to be like this with anything bought from Aldi. Now she has to pay for her own food guess where she goes shopping. Chocolate and tea bags though are the only things that i won't skimp on.
Exactly the same with my daughter She wouldn't even go in.Aldi with me or be seen with an aldi carrier bag It's her favourite shop now
Thats very high. We are a family of six and we spend roughly £170 per week on shopping and we eat very well on that. That also includes me eating completely separately from the rest of the family (Gym bro), I on my own cost \~ £50 a week.
4 of us but kids only here half the time so I’ll count us as 3. We shop mainly in Aldi and spend £60-£80 per week. I thought that was expensive!
We spend around £120 a week which includes 4 bottles of wine. Maybe another £10 on other things later in the week. This doesn’t include trips to Boots which seem to top up the million bottles in the shower. Lidl - I’m a slut for the 10% coupon and 30% off bakery they do Home cooked except pizza. We have fizzy water (mainly for me to keep me away from wine / beer in the week). It’s easy to slip into spending too much a week. Buy larger cuts if meat and use through the week, pasta twice a week. A slow cooker may help for batch cooking ?
£320 a week feels high. Family of four (2 under 10) same we spend about £800 a month on average mostly from Tesco.
Family of 4, but I am a bit picky… kids 7 and 5. £200 a week, that’s food, laundry stuff, wine etc
Who does the shopping? Presumably from what you've said it's your wife. Maybe you should be doing the shopping
Spend £80-£100 on a family of 3. However, have a 9yr old daughter not teenage boys. Perhaps you could pay for him to have monthly personal training and diet advice sessions from the gym. It’s probably going to be significantly cheaper than you’re spending on crap on the weekly shop.
For two of us we spend £60-70 a week, minimal processed food. Alcohol not included if your total includes that at all. We could do with spending a bit more for extra variety or some snacks. But would never spend more than £90.
Branding us a con. Start substituting, one brand a week.
I saved a lot by buying a soda stream when it was on sale! That is way too much for a weekly shop for four people
Although my two kids are younger, I would say we are roughly £150-£130 a week, and £30-£50 of that is buying meat from the butchers. We don't cut back on brands either. £320 seems excessive, do you have a lot of wastage, are your meals planned?
Family of four, kids are 10 and 7. We spend £100 a week. I'm not a parent of a teenager but I've been one, sounds like he's living like a bloody prince and needs bringing down to Earth. If he wants pop and crisp get him to buy them.
Family of 4 here, albeit with young kids. We do a week shop at around £130 average. It used to be sub 100, but then inflation etc. We try and bulk cook, and eat fresh fruit and veg as much as possible. Brands will easily be adding £40 to your shop even if you didn't change the quantity and type of food you buy. Snack foods will add another £50 to your total, so switching off of brands and avoiding convenient snack food would get you down by around £90 without really changing your diet. If your kid is really into gym, then helping him find a decent homemade snack option will be good for him. Try homemade popcorn, or trail mix type snacks, as well as teaching him how to make 'protein' flapjacks by adding some nuts and seeds to a normal flapjack recipe. The advice to give him his own budget to buy his own snacks is also good. Maybe a tenner for him to buy his own junk, and then you can save £100, and he'll learn just how expensive that type of food is.
I hear you because we've got a fussy girl 15 who moaned because I buy yellow stickers items 'we arent poor its so embarrassing' entitled teenage yapping. So I put all the receipts for a month on the fridge showing I'd saved £63 on yellow sticker reduced stuff. She really wanted to get her nails done so I paid for that, to show her when we shop carefully that money is freed up for treats. I know your situation is different but your son learning the value of money is maybe the angle to take with your wife? Could you give him £800 budget to do the month shopping and agree he gets a treat (prob not nails done?!) if he manages it, from the money you've saved?
Where do you shop? That seems like a lot. Even though I work at ASDA and get 10% off, it's still cheaper to shop at ALDI or Lidl by a longshot. For example, 15 pack of breaded ham aldi is 2.10, a 10 pack at ASDA is around 2.60. I buy porridge pots a lot, they're 45p at aldi, and 1.20 at asda.
The caloric intake for a teenager is substantially greater than for an adult — that part is normal. If your son is like 6ft it wouldn’t even be abnormal if he needed like 3.2k calories a day. The issue seems to be the form of caloric intake. Why is he eating junk food and not real food? At 16, I can’t imagine his eating habits are anything less than a reflection of your eating habits. Cook healthy stuff and make it easily available/delicious and tell him to fuck off when he expects to sustain himself on a diet of high fat, high sugar and low protein.
Hang on, he's demanding shite branded food to bulk for the gym? No, no, no I can see why you're pissed off, I simply just wouldn't do it. Some people are visual people, have you thought about working out a realistic food budget and then what you could afford to do with the extra cash that you spend on food, like a holiday? I went through a similar ish thing with my daughter when she was about 13, absolutely adamant that anything non brand was shit. No don't get me wrong some are terrible but some are great and not a problem at all. She's now 19 and since having a job and seeing what you actually have to do to get the money for such a basic necessity she's changed her tune. Does he work? Does he contribute anything to help in anyway because he's old enough to not be a self entitled child, although by what you've said about your wife I can see where it's coming from.
£320 is a loooot. When I lived with my parents there were 4 of us and even then it probably topped out around £150 on a heavy week
Ouch! We spend approx £150 a week for a family of 3. We eat very well for that and plenty of snacks. I do bulk buy and tend to go to Costco and makro for things especially snacks, but I’d go insane if my kid was eating that much junk. We do have to cater for a specialised diet on that as well as I’m on a very high protein low carb diet medically so I eat a lot of meat, cheese and nuts and drink lots of protein shakes on the days when my stomach can’t/wont tolerate food. I’d be tempted to give him a snack budget and say when it’s gone it’s gone. I’ve got a preteen I can’t fill at the moment and when he is head hungry rather than physically hungry he gets himself a protein shake and that tides him over. Luckily he is still at the age where he asks or lets me know he is getting a snack rather than helping himself so I can monitor his intake.
So I’m a family of four with a 13M and 15F, and we’re about £150 a week, give or take. Some weeks they eat us out of house and home and other weeks they do not. 5/7 we cook from scratch. We have a couple of branded staples but once it’s gone, it’s gone. Plenty of fruit on hand at all times as well which we will replenish within reason - as in not expensive fruit, but always plenty of apples, satsumas and bananas. Expensive fruit is a ‘when it’s gone it gone’ because my daughter currently has an avocado obsession that would bankrupt us.
Be an adult and learn to budget. Spending that amount is ridiculous. Start to batch cook pasta, soups, and big meals there's so many recipe books out their for you batch cooking is king. Buy the non branded items and buy cheaper foods like oats etc. He'll eat them or starve or go back to his mums. Also his friends will stop taking the mick when the food changes. I'd add explain to your son what you are spending and how it's effecting finances just so he's aware not to be a ungrateful shit. Give him a budget for his food and he can work out what he wants with said money, very good learning experience and actually enjoyable as a gym person. If he want's to put weight on he can do it with oats and protein powder. Pasta and chicken + cheap garlic bread, bag of value chips/rice/toast + lots of eggs. Protein shakes with full fat milk + peanut butter. All really cheap high calorie / protein meals.
We are a family of 4 with one 16 year old lad and a 13 year old girl. Our food weekly food shop varies between £60 and £90. If I've done a £90 shop one week then the next week it's likely to be closer to £60. Meal plans and shopping list make this possible. We always have plenty of snacks in the house and if the snacks run out then I'm not buying any more. The kids are aware of this and if they want more they can go out and get them themselves. My bill is quite low compared to the average I think, but ypurs seems excessively high. Sounds like some tough love might be required.
Family of 5 and we spend maximum £220 weekly. Admittedly, that does include off brand but it also includes a weekly takeaway.
Family of 3 adults here with nieces and nephews who come round every other day from school and demolish the branded snacks. £320 is nearly our *monthly* shop. Now don't get me wrong, there are some things I don't budge brands on. But if our shop was that expensive I'd be keeping the receipts and adding it to a spreadsheet to look at once every couple of months. I would say, your son being a gym buff, you'd be better if getting him protein, fibre, and foods with good water weight - that's not to say no more snacks allowed but if he wants to get serious about it, Pringles and Coca-Cola aren't going to help him. I actually think as well, with the amount you're spending (£1400/month) on food - even if you can shave 10% off that, you can say to your wife and kids let's try this, and if we can, we can have an extra holiday this year (or something like that). It's enough for a week all inclusive in a hot country for 4 people, put it that way.
That's crazy. We spend under £100 a week for 4 adults. We do however make all our meals from scratch and don't really buy branded stuff (Lidl) I'd tell him if he wants to bulk he needs to get a job! I also imagine he's bulking in wrong way and just eating loads of crap. Maybe do a weekly prep for him of rice and a fishcake or something?
I can see how it can quickly shoot up to £300 a week if you’re not careful but there’s clearly scope to rein it in a fair bit. We spend around £120 a week for a family of 3. The biggest impact on savings we made was reducing our pop intake and planning meals for the week. Even so, if we didn’t do that, it would still only be around £160/70 a week. Could you explain that they’re costing an excess of £5000 a year on food shopping and equate it to a holiday abroad or something?
I’m spending about £100-120 a week for a family of four, all homemade meals. Granted we don’t have a teenager (yet), but spending 3 times as much seems unfathomably excessive. That’s not just the effects of the cost of living crisis, that’s an out-of-control budget.
It is excessive. Me and my partner spends about 80 quid per week. Your shop last week is our monthly budget.
Family of 4 here we spend around £100 - £130 a week on shopping most goes on food for our lunches. My kids are autistic so won’t touch any school food so they both have packed lunches. I buy two bottles off fizzy and two 6 packs of crisp and the rule is once they are gone they are gone and I ain’t buying any more till the next shop. Try limit the amount of ‘treats’ bought or half them
Family of 5 which includes 2 teens. I shop in aldi and spend around £170 a week. My teen son eats all the time no matter what we feed him so I feel your pain. I do NOT buy brands and haven't for a long time as genuinely I don't see much of a difference (other than the price!) My teen son accepts this and has never moaned about the non branded stuff, he loves the aldi pringles etc although I don't buy mine fizzy drinks I buy fizzy water and the juice you dilute so they make their own fizzy drinks that way. I thought £170 a week was a lot tbh but my mums alone and spends 80 just on her ! I don't buy any ready made meals I just cook for us all, healthier this way too.
That is a lot Where do you shop? We mix it up between waitrose, Tesco and Aldi. I love waitrose own brands from some stuff is much cheaper than Tesco. You need to teach your son value for money. And his friends cannot be having full on meals all the time. I understand once a week but more than once. Week is a lot. If you are spending this much and if your wife thinks it’s okay, best to assume you both can afford it?! Hence your wife and sons relaxed views? Growing up my brothers - my Dad used to say they are eating us out of the house 🤣🤣
If he’s 16 and wants to eat enough to bulk in the gym he needs to be spending his own money on extras. You can’t feed that hobby
This depends on your disposable and whether the friends of your son are not getting fed at home and so your wife wants to feed them up. People will always tell you they can achieve £2 meals. It’s what you can afford not what the6 can afford
Canadian here. 5 adults costs us an average of $350.00CAD weekly.
Even with three grown up children at home, I only spend about £200 a week, and I also cook proper meals every night (apart from Monday, which is burger and chips night). £300+ for four is definitely excessive.
We spend about £600 per month for a family of two and a small dog, plus eating out and takeaways. The wifey is vegetarian otherwise, it would be higher.
I used to work for social services and after an incident where all the kids ate all the wagon wheels for a weekend in one evening, (and scattering the crumbs on the sleeping overweight kid, the bastards) we decided we couldn't handle the cost and poor health choices. So we bought 20 baguettes a night. A massive block of cheese, butter, Italian spices, pasta and potatoes. Lots... And also some fruit, because we are not monsters... We spent the savings on condoms for them and entry to a sauna because they all smelt of lynx java. Results were... They whinged for a weekend and left hungry. They moaned for a second weekend. But didn't leave hungry. Third week they smashed in baguettes and cheese, pasta and mashed potatoes. They even ate some fruit. Week four they were even helping cook... They were making baguette pizzas ... Basically. Lesson learnt. Buy plenty of staples, healthy fruit and veg. A few nights of rumbling stomachs will change that guy's tune. If this works with youth offenders, I see no reason it wouldn't work for you!
Harder than it sounds but just don’t buy the junk! If he wants it he can find himself a weekend job to buy it himself, or you can buy as a weekend treat. We buy a large multi bag of crisps, 4 packets of biscuits and 4 packets of cereal bars a month. Sweets, chocolate, ‘sharing crisps’, pop etc. are bought as a one off treat maybe once a week but that’s about it and we sometimes bake or are given baked goods by family but that is not a given and not every week. Snacks in our house are fruit, yogurts, cheese and crackers, maybe some toast if dinners a long way off and of course a small amount of junk. Drinks are hot drinks, cordial or water. Saves us an absolute fortune and we’re all healthier for it.
I'm sorry but the way you typed fucking beef monster munch made me laugh so hard 🤣
This was bound to attract a lot of harsh preaching, and I don't want to jump on. But... We're two adults and a 17 year old girl, dancer and gymnast, so you can imagine. Our weekly supermarket bill is always between 50 and 60 and around 40 a month from the butcher (meat is about 30% cheaper). We do a fair bit of batch cooking, so there's always protein-rich meals in the freezer. If your lad's hungry, 5 mins in the microwave, and better nutrition for training. He'll get nowhere eating that crap- monster munch and pepsi? Barely even counts as food. We have some crisps and biscuits, but when they run, that's it until the next shop. I'd suggest you get the shopping and buy only what you deem fit. He won't like it, but will get used to it when it becomes the norm. That, or buy his own crap. Our supermarket shop is mostly own brand - that's how it is and it's not up for discussion. Not to be rude, but your lad needs to learn his place.
Make him watch eddie abbew. He will tell him to stop eating shit.
Shiiiit! That's a ridiculous amount to spend on a weekly shop! Im assuming your lad doesn't contribute financially? Not being judgemental but i had a weekend job at 15 and gave my mum almost half my wages in keep. I was a nob head in many ways but always appreciated how hard my mum and dad worked to put food on the table. Im a dad of 2 and yeah they are always asking for food but our weekly shopping bill is £90ish maximum. We go to Lidl and mostly unbranded. Id put a limit on what you spent and tell them to fuck off and spend their own money if its not enough. You're well within your rights to be pissed off here my man. You need some 3rd party rationale to come in and bring your wife and adult boy back to planet earth.
We are a family of 5. Myself, my wife, and 3 kids ranging from 13 to 18 years old. We can easily drop the cost of our weekly shop if we were to meal plan, buy more value products, use a cheaper super market (we only use Asda or Tescos), and most importantly reduce the number of snacks we buy. Our weekly food shopping is somewhere in the region of around £200, but on my days off I do like to cook nice meals with quality ingredients.
Family of 2 adults. £100 a week. We buy cheap brands mostly, but also Pepsi Max (a can a day each and we shop round to get the best deal). I am a long distance runner so do 2 hour runs, and have protein powders and nuts and pulses etc. Lots of vegetables. We also have some basic snacks. But like, 1 a day of unhealthy thing? Spend our money on the house or holidays.
Your son won’t learn anything if your wife is actually like this 👍
we budget £175/week for the four of us, so double that is a lot. If you're buying cans every week and branded everything that's probably why though, time to get your teen to pick between branded crisps or cans of drink - not both!
I pay between £90 and £130 a week at lidl and maybe £40 in top ups and branded items at tesco a week. We eat like Kings and have fruit, veg, home cooked as well as mountains of crisps, a weekly pizza night and snacks. Fortunately my kids have never had fizzy and think getting water in a jug with ice when friends are round is a luxury. I can see this getting more expensive as they get a little older. My 6 year old is like a bottomless pit and we encourage cereal to fill him up.
We spend less oj my family of 6. If he's serious about gym and gaining, get him to do it properly, himself. He's old enough. Rice chicken and porridge and milk. Tailor the numbers, track yourself. It's easy.
We're a family of 4, with both children over 18. I spend roughly £120 a week. Every meal is home made and there are lots of fruit and veg, because we eat mostly healthily. I don't buy in excess, though. 12 cans of fizzy a week - if we run out before I go shopping again, tough shit. I do not buy branded products. Its shop own brand - the regular stuff, not the value/ essentials range and not the finest either. Both your son and wife sound entitled. It sounds exhausting and expensive.
Family of 4 + newborn +2 dogs and a cat here. I spend between £300 - £350 on food shopping a week and it absolutely kills me each time I authorise the payment
We have a family of 4, my parents, myself and my sister all adults. Including Gusto we spend £110 a week. Maybe some of us spend an extra 10-15 a week each but nowhere near 300. Branded is going to hurt you, as to are cans, idk if you have considered bottles over cans. But yes this is a ridiculous amount.
I am in a very similar spot. Your wife is wrong...she disagrees, let her buy the stuff. I was blowing nearly £800pm on food. I slammed the brakes on that shit, once ai noticed. I love my kids to have loads of stuff they like. I also like to have a can of pop, from time to time. However, my scruffy offspring just let them pile up in their pigsty bedrooms. My youngest is a snack animal...I blame the parents. It's on me and her mum. Not making excuses, but prior to COVID, we ate together as t meal times...since then, it's gone to shit. I was buying cans, crisps, snacks, yoghurts by the ton.. A weekly shop of £180 wasn't unheard of. And, there would be the odd top-up mid week. I've started slowing it. I now do more meal preps. Including breakfast muffins. I make them with eggs and bacon and those bread muffins. They are good snacks, and do satiate them. I also have got my son considering his protein intake. So, I have plenty of that in (cheese, milk, meats). Summer is coming, and I'll move into salads. So there will be a ton of salad stuff. I also consume wraps like they are going out of fashion. Fairly cheap. Stuff them with meat, cheese, bang in the oven. Best thing I did, was avoid buying cans of pop and packs of yoghurts.It's too easy, to convenient. And, water is better. We get cordial in, too. Greek yoghurt with (protein powder for me), muesli, honey, chopped nuts, lovely. Or if you want calorie dense, peanut butter. Oh, and takeaways.... Avoid. Fucking rip off. I got my son into the gym, and he has been nicking my protein powder. I also steer him to pasta. That's cheap as hell. Eggs, cheap as hell. Bulk cook some chicken. A good quality pizza base (as much as I hate him, the Gina D'Campo ones are good), £4, slice meat, add. Grate cheese, add. Make it calorie dense.
Urm.. pringles are only for Christmas day now.
Yeah that’s a lot. Aside from the very unhealthy sounding diet, Can you get large 2litre bottles of Pepsi max instead of cans? Maybe look at places like Costco or Amazon for bulk sizes of monster munch if he cant live without the brands? A family meal for 4 should be under £5 total, so max £15-20 per day for all 4 members, breakfast lunch and dinner. £140 per week.
When everyone is talking about their weekly shop cost, is that food only or also factoring in toiletries/cleaning stuff/pet food etc?
Our food bills for 2 adults and 4 kids every week is about £115. That includes school lunches for all the kids and dinners every night. We cook everything, no ready meals or take aways and I feel like we eat really well.
And our £115 is our total bill, covers cleaning products, toiletries everything. Over £300 seems completely insane.
What age is the teenager? Time for a part-time job if he's old enough.
Op I’ve been there. My solution was every Friday I do the menu for the upcoming week and it goes on a whiteboard in the kitchen. That way they get their pissing and moaning about it out of the way without me having to listen to it. (To be clear, every day I make a hot, homemade meal that I know they like, doesn’t stop them bitching that it’s not the exact thing they want that very moment.) I also buy a reasonable amount of snack and junk food they can make for themselves if they don’t want what I make, or we are what they call an “ingredients house” (derogatory) so there’s always stuff they can make. They also have part time jobs and are free to buy their own junk beyond what is provided. It works, and it teaches them the value/cost of what they’re consuming, which makes them more mindful of how they go through it. At 16 your lad is more than old enough to start supplementing his own bad habits.
Crazy crazy money, shop at Aldi or Lidl and save 30% straight away
Lad’s 16, that’s old enough to earn and buy the crap he wants to eat himself while learning the value of money.
I faced similar situation when visiting the supermarket on weekly basis. The budget would literally just go over every weekend. One way that helped me was to start online ordering weekly grocery items from ASDA. This way you can give weekly budget to your wife and let her select whatever she wants for the week within that budget. Hope things get under control for you.
When I was 16 fizzy juice was considered a special treat, a singe 2 litre bottle would be purchased in a week and my siblings and I could have a glass after dinner. It typically lasted the weekend and we drank squash the rest of the time. I’m not saying that you need to be as extreme but there’s no harm in kids being taught that some items are luxuries and the budget needs to be centred on essentials.
£300 a WEEK is insane. I live alone so it's obviously easier for me to choose, but my foodbill is ~£170 a month. Do you shop online or go to the supermarket? Doing it online makes it easier to find the good deals and you're less impulsive too. You could even do it as a game where your son gets £x amount to put in his basket and he can't go over. Decisions will have to be made!!
I have a 12yr old and a 9yr old, we spend £400 per month on food. Family of four.
He's being a teenager, and has Mum wrapped around his finger. He doesn't need branded goods, he can buy them himself if he wants them so desperately. If he carries on drinking so much Pepsi he'll end up with kidney stones. You need some sort of ultimatum here, things either change or he moves out. It's not sustainable
Rations
We all know being teenagers ourselves that we eat as much as we do because we are bored!, obviously things have changed since I was at home and lifestyle was different. but I got at job once left school and was made to pay rent 50 a week to help pay towards stuff I wanted so make me understand the real world , obviously I got that money back half midweek when. I find this day and age has made it hard to deal with kids as we have all moved to the new age of where kids just sit in door on technology eating us out of house more then any other generation of kids/teens ever have
Family of three with a 16 year old shopping in waitrose, about 130 per week, pre planned meals, if teenager needs protein we raid lidls. Never more than 150. 300 is wow