Nearly there...

The £1.50 challenge starts tomorrow. As Su and I are pooling our resources this gives us £15 for 5 days worth of food and drink. Obviously planning is essential if you're not going to get to Tuesday and find you have no money left. So yesterday we went and did our weekly shop.

Here's what we bought:

• Coffee (our most expensive item) £4.00
• broccoli 33p
• 2 loaves of bread 79p each
• Sweetcorn 35 p a tin
• 1 can of fruit 35p
• 5 tins of kidney beans 23p each
• Leaks 56p
• Milk £1
• Mushrooms 27p
• Carrots 25p
• 1kg Porridge 75p
• Peanut butter £1.09
• Lemon Curd 59p
• Stock cubes 40p
• 1 kg Rice 40p

This comes to £13.42 leaving us £1.58 for additional purchases later in the week if necessary. We may well need some more milk.

The plan is:

Breakfast - Porridge made with water and a couple of cups of coffee

Lunch - Either a peanut butter or lemon curd sandwich (no marg or butter)

Dinner - Rice, beans and vegetables

I know that a number of people are a little dubious and critical as to the value of this exercise but I would challenge anyone to try this for 5 days and not learn one thing that doesn't provide us with a better understanding of the issues that many people in our world face.

For those who are struggling to see what those lessons might be I'll blog my thoughts each day this week.