Grocery Bills

[condiem]

Can anyone give a rough guide on how much grocery shopping can cost a family of 4 a week?  All the usual sort of groceries and household cleaning products.  In the UK currently we spend £100 a week!  Is it about the same or dearer?

[SGD280]

We are a family of four.  (kids 2 &4)

We spend 150 pounds per week or SGD 280.

If we add wine,  it goes up to SGD350

[gone local]

We spend less than $1000 (2 adults, 3 kids including 2 teenagers and a maid) per month but we shop in NTUC which is one of the cheapest supermarkets and doesn't have all the expat goodies some of the more expensive ones have.  We have a maid who cooks for us and this keeps our food bills down as she knows how to cook the local vegetables and other local ingredients.  We buy our meat from a wholesaler and freeze it.  When we first arrived, we spent a lot more than this because we didn't have a maid, so I wanted to buy western ingredients and also I just wasn't ready for the more local experience of shopping at NTUC.  We didn't know about the wholesaler until a couple of years later - you need a car for that too.  Now, I rarely set foot in the expat type of supermarkets as I just see them as a rip off.

[lost in the supermarket]

It depends what you buy - you can get lots of UK products here (Cold Storage supermarket are selling lots of Waitrose products now) but they will cost more than the UK. 

If you are buying things like pork, chicken or fish then they are quite cheap, beef and lamb are expensive - turkey is practically unheard of apart from around Christmas.

we've got Fairprice (NTUC) near us but they've just upgraded to a Fairprice Finest and their prices have risen as a result (the woes of the area becoming popular with lots of expats!).  The market is cheap but you can't do all your shopping there, for tinned/dry goods and household products you'll have to go to a supermarket.

I think we spend about $200-250 per week but that includes a couple of bottles of wine and some beers (alcohol is expensive), it also includes me having to go to about 3 different supermarkets to shop around (prices and goods available vary from place to place) - if I was working and only had time to shop in one place I'd probably spend more.

[Kubes.SG]

The Kubes' household grocery weekly bills are in the range of $600-700 per week.  Two adults, 2 kiddies (1 a teenager) and 1 domestic helper.  This does not include wine or beer that we source separately, but it does include 2 bottles of CEF each week (hard surface cleaner) and no, we don't know what the maid does with it.

[Per week??]

Kubes .... did you mean $600 - 700 per week or per month

[LOLLY]

Kubes .... did you mean $600 - 700 per week or per month

LOL at $ per month - I am with Kubes on the above amounts PER WEEK!

[renedered NOT]

may be Kubes is a connoisseur of fine foods and is not interested in rendered meat from NTUC or local wholesalers...

[Us Too]

We spend around $800 to $1K a week on food too. This includes 6 to 8 six packs of beer and about $300 to $400 at the butcher. We have three full meals a day: breakfasts for all, lunch after school for the kids and a full-on dinner for us all every evening. We adults also have a light lunch every day, unless we are out for business lunches. We entertain at least once a week so chuck another $300 to $400 on top for that each time.

Haven't included wine, which we buy by the case from a separate source and spend about $1500 to $2k a month on, depending on if we need to stock up on champers, it can be more. Also does not include hard liquor, etc. We buy those from duty free, which would include bottles of gin, vodka, Scotch, brandy, liqueurs. depending on what we need to stock up on or if we are going through a particular cocktail "phase".

[bargain hunter]

There is fine dining, and there is fine dining.

Pure waste spending, in some cases.

Just be savvy when shopping.

[Not really]

Anyone spending 600 to 700 per week is an idiot. That is more than enough to last a family of four for one month.

Where do you shop Kubes? Issitan?

No wonder you can't afford to buy that condo at The Sail you've been dreaming of!

Fool.

Some people like to live well, some like to live like paupers. Somne people east ast restuarants and others in hawker centers, telling themselves it is "yummy" and passing it off as a cultural experience.

If you can't afford to live here... consider going home. Don't knock those who can.
Or maybe stick to eating pigs guts in the hawker centers and turning off your airconditioning.

Fool.

[jalanperak]

There is fine dining, and there is fine dining.

Pure waste spending, in some cases.

Just be savvy when shopping.

The funny part of all this is that some of the best ingredients you can get here come from some of the least expensive sources - wet markets. Chicken, pork, lamb and seafood here can be fantastic, and at prices well below what you'd pay in the US (can't speak for any other areas). You do have to do a bit of exploring and networking to tap into the good sources (and I'm far from the master here - I'm learning every weekend), but they're out there. Beef tends to be expensive, but even then you can find some very decent "regular" quality beef at some wet market stalls at prices far below what Jason's and the expat butchers rip you off for. And if you want the ultimate, the selection of Wagyu beef here is pretty astounding (as are the prices, of course).

[Kubes.SG]

Of course it is per week.   It is very easy to get to that level in a regular grocery shop.  Mrs Kubes likes to go to Cold Storage and Great World.  We are incredibly lucky that our maid loves to cook and is absolutely fantastic at it.  She started in a SG with a local SG Chinese family, then worked for Kiwi and AU families before she came to us.  So she can cook just about anything, and brilliantly.

Life is too short to penny-pinch.  If you enjoy top quality meat, fish, chicken, cheese, juices, pate, fresh fruit, vegetables, and dairy products then unfortunately.you have to pay for it because it all flown in.

Sorry, we tried the local Marigold products, the meiji sweetened milk, the plastic cheese, etc.  Life is too short to eat that crap.

To Perweek - so you think I would want to buy into the The Sail - ha ha ha?  Comparing the qualify of The Sail to a good quality Condo in another city, is like comparing Marigold Orange Juice Drink (a cordial) to 100% pure orange juice from AU or US.

[John Ramb8]

My strategy is to buy staples/veg from NTUC. But you need to get there by lunchtime really, as they seem to have a policy of completely selling out all the fresh produce by the late afternoon everyday. I.e. Go in even the early evening with a shopping list of required ingredients, and you're pretty stuffed...

Then for the 'core' ingredients, say meat and fish I go to Cold Storage or 360 or similar, as I know it will be quality, and the staff are relatively knowledgable and helpful [i.e. they can actually answer questions, without looking like a rabbit caught in headlights]

My local NTUC has a very impressive and extensive ice display of fresh fish, but I'm sure the aunties would not understand if the ang-mo asked them to scale and fillet a fish for me. I could do it myself at home, but it is messy... and I'll pay a premium to get pre-prep food frankly.

My local mother-in-law gets all her beef from Tekka Market, and it is good. For me there is no point paying to trek there, to save some $. If you are nearer than me though... you can be sure that is a good source.

To the OP... to a great extent, it depends if you have a maid knowledgable enough to shop at wet markets. Or if you just send her off to say Cold Storage for everything. How long is a piece of string?

It is quite possible for a single expat (adult) person to eat very well on say S$15 a day, if that is what they wish to do [I'm thinking say S$1 for brekko of cereal, $10 for bratwurst mash and gravy for lunch down at the basement of Ngee Ann, $4 for Yong Tau Foo or chicken rice in the evening at a food-court...]

[go Kubes]

$500 a week at least...no use scumming it with pesticide ridden green veg from malaysia and meat that has been slaughtered god knows where and when. Someone suggested a "fabulous" meat guy at a wet market once so I went along out of curiosity- foulblood soaked chopping board, no shirt, sweaty and handles the meat with bare hands...hmmm no thanks. There is NO way I penny count it on our food bills here or anywhere else in the world.