One of the odd quirks of my new job is my £70 a week use it or lose it subsistence allowance.

This is basically for food while working away from home, £25 per full day and then lesser for partial days.

The amount is obviously reasonably designed to cover two meals if you're eating in a cafe and then getting a take out. It's actually pretty reasonable.

However I'm reliably informed that the office don't care how you spend this money. What my new colleague does is take a cooler and make all her own food rather than eating out.

And if you do that you can't spend £70 for 3 days worth of home-prepped food, well it might be possible, but it'd be a stretch, kind of like Brewster's Millions!

Caviar sandwiches anyone?

So the strategy is to just do your weekly food shop with the £70.

But even with that, it's £280 a month if you're working every week, that's still actually much more than you'd ever need for food for one in a month, you can eat generously for around £200 a month.

I could technically pick up enough fresh veg and fruit to see me over the weekend and frozen on the way back on the final day and probably get away with it, might be stretching it though.

But it'd be a challenge to spend that much just on food....

My own strategy....

I only work fortnightly, that's my choice, don't want or need to do anymore, but I'm going for a hybrid strategy of meal deals for dinner, some kind of simple home-made sandwich thing for lunch and then that'd leave me enough to buy pretty much all my dried and tinned goods for a month.....

Something like this with the red being 'immediate spends' while at work and blue being take-homes!

Of course I will probably get a take-out coffee a day and maybe lunch out out once or twice, but even so I'll have around £60 a month to sub the food shop with, that goes a long way.

TBH I'm looking at this as just extra income, and it's very welcome!

It's also untaxed OFC as they are expenses, this is NICE!

Loving this new job thus far!

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