Hi Guest,

We are now giving away one 12 month membership per week to the person who donates the best tip to the Savings Vault. Everyone can enter. If you are already a member you win an extra 12 months added on to your existing membership.

This week Frogdancer has won 12 months membership to the Savings Vault with this great hint:

Warning! Takeaways cost more than you think!

I have discovered the hard way that takeaway food is more expensive than you think! At the end of the year I reviewed my finances and took a good look at how I had spent my money over the last 12 months. I went over the spreadsheet I have been using over the last two years to help me track my grocery spending. It was sent to me by SS member Janine L. and I owe her a big debt of gratitude.

Our family has five adults (four of which are teenage boys but they eat like adults), two dogs, two cats and six chickens. Everything I buy from the supermarket, animal produce store, butcher, fruit shop and so on are included. I don't have time to go through dockets to extract non-edibles, so everything is lumped in.

In 2010 we spent $140.22 a week on groceries, which I thought that was pretty good. Then for 2011 I refined the spreadsheet slightly to have a column specifically for 'takeaway' instead of just including it in 'other'. This year our average weekly grocery spend was $130.72. The boys are growing rapidly and eating more, yet our spend went down and we saved $520 roughly on groceries over last year.

Not bad at all, I thought! I was smugly patting myself on the back when I thought to tot up the 'takeaway' spend for the year. This is normally included as part of the weekly grocery figure but I thought I would add it up separately out of interest. I was shocked to discover we spent $511.65 on takeaway. This is the equivalent of almost FOUR WEEK'S WORTH OF GROCERIES. I spent a month's worth of money on a few pizzas, bags of hot chips (with potato cakes and dim sims but that's not the point!) and some fundraiser chocolate frogs when I was doing corrections at work and thought I needed a 'pick-me-up'.

Are you kidding me?! There is no way that all that takeaway equals the equivalent amount of food we would normally eat in a month. Imagine how much lower my weekly spend would have been if I had had the backbone to resist the siren call of sending the boys to get fish and chips or pizza. I thought I was pretty good with the food budget, but watch out for those nights when you think that you're too tired to cook or that 'I only have one or two kids with me so takeaway would be cheap'.

It really adds up. You have been warned!

The best way to win a membership is to write helpful, interesting, unique and error free hints. You need to include how much money you saved, how you saved it, what you did and how much you paid. The more detail you provide the more likely you are to win a 12 month membership.

You do not have to answer all the questions to enter the competition. Each hint entered is judged separately. If you send 5 hints. They will be considered 5 separate entries. Which means you have a much higher chance of winning by entering one or two top quality hints than if you entered twenty brief, vague tips. Quality is everything!

If you do not have an answer to a question, or it does not apply to you, please leave it blank.

Thanks for giving it a go. Good luck!

Many grins,
Fiona