How to save money on food on a student budget

This is a collaborative post.

I remember being a student, the budget doesn’t go very far and there are always night outs that you would rather spend money on than vegetables! Here are some amazing tips to help you to eat healthily on a student budget!

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Can You Eat Healthily On A Student Budget?

Being at uni your life is full of lectures, work placements, essay writing and the student union. However, are you going to manage to eat healthily too? Especially when you have to do it on a budget of your student loan. It isn’t always easy, especially if this is your first time away from home and you are a complete beginner at cooking. But there are ways to eat healthily on a student budget, and we are going to show you how.

Batch Cooking

Bulk cooking is a great way to be organised as well as saving some money. We all know that you save money by buying bigger packets of food, but how many of us actually batch cook? When you batch cook, it also takes out the chore of having to cook from scratch all of the time. You can buy some reusable plastic tubs to store the food in the fridge or freezer. Then just take them out as and when you want to eat them.

Use a permanent marker to write dates on the boxes and what the meal is. It is cheaper to do this than to buy ready-made meals. Great meals for batch cooking are shepherds pie, spaghetti bolognaise sauce, Chilli, casseroles.

Special Offers At The Supermarket

Look for special offers in the supermarket. Sometimes when you buy your shopping, you get extra discounts for using your store loyalty card. You can even save your points up for a week that you are really struggling for money. Then use the points to pay for your food shop.

All supermarkets have a selection of products that they put on special offer every week or month. Look for these offers and save some money. Most supermarkets price-match too. If your Sainsbury’s is opposite an Aldi, then Sainsbury’s will price match Aldi’s best selling products.

Yellow stickers are also worth looking out for in the supermarket. Asda often reduces food down to 10p to get rid of it at the end of the day. This is best at around 6pm. Sainsbury’s reduce food to 75% off if it goes out of date that day and Aldi reduce food by 30% the day before it goes out of date. Check if it’s freezable, and only buy what you need. It isn’t a bargain if you end up throwing it in the bin

Olio

Olio is a great app that you can download and get free food, as well as other items. People sometimes buy tins and they don’t eat them, so they get advertised on the app. Cake shops might put cakes on there at the end of a day, to save them going in the bin and Tesco’s have people collecting from them to put on Olio. There is often a lot of fresh fruit and veg on the apps, so you could make something healthy from it for dinner.

The app is free to download and free to use. It is a great way to meet people too if you are new to the area.

Too Good To Go

This is my awesome suggestion to takeaways. We all know when you are a student, your time is so precious. When you are spending nights writing essays, You do not want to have to think about cooking! You need to use your time efficiently and keep the flow of writing going. So this is where the app comes in handy because it offers a few different meal options from vegan to Costa. You sign up to the app and add your payment card. Then you look at the options of food.

You choose what food you want. There is a wide range of healthy options to choose from, like salads from well know cafe’s and restaurants as well as junk food. You pay something silly like £3.50 for enough food for 2 people. So it is excellent on the pocket, it saves a meal from the bin and it means you don’t need to cook.

It is a win-win situation – just concentrate on that essay!

Sharing Costs With Other Students

You can buy food in bulk from most Supermarkets. If you are on a budget, you can buy a huge bag of pasta for a few pounds and split the cost with other students. You can make so many healthy meals with pasta like pasta with courgette sauce and spicy sausage pasta bake.

Sharing costs with other students helps them to budget and eat healthily as much as it helps you.

Ask Your Parents For Healthy Cheap Recipes To Cook

When it comes to cooking some cheap healthy meals, there is nobody better to ask than your parents or grandparents. They have probably been in the same situation before and know from experience, what it is like. Don’t be ashamed to ask them before you go to uni if they can put some easy recipes together in a folder.

You could even get them to give you cooking lessons before you leave for uni. They will be more than happy to help because they will then know that you are eating healthily.

If you are already at uni, this is a great chance to video call them and get cooking advice which you are trying to make something healthy to eat. It gives your parents the chance to know that you are looking after yourself.