VENT: Food & petrol prices

Really need a vent... just filled up my car and it's $90! When I bought it 2 years ago, it cost $60 max to fill. Great, now I feel guilty using the car. Also, went to the supermarket, everything that we need to buy has increased in price. DS loves bananas, probably has a couple of large ones per day, but at $2.50 per kg, I found myself thinking that we can't have him eating so many anymore, which is awful! Providing our family with healthy food is our priority but at these prices we will be very stretched.

No savings for us, all our income will be chewed up by essential living expenses. Poor DH works so hard and he never sees any money.

These price increases are really freaking me out now.

i hate buying bananas at the supermarket - they are usually a minimum of a $1 more expensive than the fruit and veg. rising prices are just a fact of life now.

I never pay full price for my gas. i either use the pak n save fuel voucher or go to the local gull and use their discounted pump. i think i paid $2.10 a couple of days ago.

a couple of weeks ago i went into New World and they didnt even have any canned fuit salad for under $2. i know i can get it cheaper so i just refused to buy it at that price.

I hear you. I have had to alter my budget for food shopping by $30 this year and petrol is costing $45 more for a full tank than it cost me last year- $145 for a full tank and my husband needs a full tank each week to get to work (public transport not an option as he works far away). We don't have a second car and couldn't afford to run a second one anyway. It is really depressing me as Ive had to alter our budget and now between the rise in petrol and food and DS having a milk intolerance and reflux, he needs special formula and medication, we hardly have any spare money left anymore. I feel for DH also as he works so hard and never gets any money for himself.

I dont understand why the government dont step in and do something, I keep thinking if we struggle to make ends meet with DH on a reasonable wage and me doing some casual work here and there, how do people manage to even eat with less income than we have? It really concerns me as it keeps going up, will it get to a point where we can't afford things anymore?

We are trying the fruit and veg and butcher shop this week, will see if it makes a difference.

I'll need to find a good vege shop near us or even look at having a vege garden.

I watched Campbell Live earlier and there was a woman on trying to lose weight. She has cut all junk food out of her diet and her food bill is now 3 times more. She said that there was no way she could afford to give her family the recommended 5 fruit and vege per day. She worked out that she could get 12 big packets of chippies for the price of 12 apples or something insane like that. It costs her $20-$25 for chicken breasts for her family of 5 plus the cost of some vege, when she could feed them at the fish and chip shop for $13. They also talked about coke and other crappy drinks being cheaper than milk.

Can he take the train?

unfortunately public transport doesn't work for DH because he's a shift worker and there's no public transport available for the time that he needs to start and finish work. Even if he could use public transport occasionally when he does a day shift, it would mean 4 hours travelling each day, instead of 1.5-2 hours in a car. He does try and car pool with a guy from work but they never seem to get the same shifts.

We are hoping to move closer ASAP. Just waiting for the house to sell, it's been on the market for nearly 2 months with not a lot of interest.

It will be nice to have DH for an extra 2 hours a day.

wiggly_jiggly, that's a shame that your DH doesn't have the company car anymore. I bet a lot of organisations aren't including a car in the rem package anymore.

I realised today that we spend more on petrol than on food. Awful really. My car is parked up for a while because we just can't afford to run it. Depressing being housebound though.

God I'm thankful we spend really quite little on petrol by comparison. I get $50 of diesel a fortnight.

I'm doing a food shopping challenge for the next fortnight of only spending $50 a week and in that I have to get formula and nappies. I realised I can make quite a lot with what we already have in our pantry.

Mine basically works out to be $21 when I take formula and nappies out of it