A pound a day? and a weekly menu plan

Could you live on £1 a day?
I’m not sure I could.

In fact when I first heard that I didn’t understand it – what was the £1 to cover? Chocolates? Mid morning snacks? Drinks? – maybe. But ALL my food and drink? Surely not!
But yes – the challenge is to live on £1 a day for all your meals for 5 days.

So where does this figure of £1 come from?
According to the ‘Live Below the Line’ campaign approximately 1.4 billion people worldwide live in extreme poverty – only having an amount of money which equates to a (UK) pound a day for EVERYTHING.

But, (I thought as I read this) surely £1 can buy you so much more in undeveloped countries, can’t it?
Well, No – apparently in the various complex calculations someone has made, they’ve taken this into account too – and have looked at the purchasing power of money in reaching the conclusion that they really do mean one pound a day.

It’s sobering isn’t it?

And challenging.

After all, in our home we probably spend a years worth of pounds-a-day in under a month – and we can easily blow a months allowance on getting a takeaway one evening (which would leave us pretty hungry for the other 29 days!).

4pounds3

£1 seems very difficult to me and I’m going to have to put some serious thought into how I do it. But for this week I thought I would budget for a pound a head for supper for the family – £4 an evening for a family of 4. Although I do usually watch prices, I haven’t previously calculated the total cost of meals including all the individual ingredients – and it all adds up very fast. I’ve found it quite challenging, educational and time-consuming!

So here’s my menu for £20 for 5 evening meals – £19.38 to be precise (it could have been less, but I splurged on some very good sausages that were half price and maybe one or two other things). Calculating meal costs is difficult as there are so many products / shops / offers out there. These are my calculations, based on the prices I got shopping through mysupermarket.co.uk – someone else doing them on a different day would almost certainly get a different answer!

I’ll let you know what the family thought about it all next week (and if they notice a difference!).

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