For a family of 5 with 2 helpers, I find P5,000 a week actual food expense not reasonable and can still be reduced if :
1) There is a menu plan for the cook to follow
2) There is a budget and actual cost template for monitoring purposes.
So, to start my year and as a believer of "You can't manage what you don't measure", I prepared a 3-week menu plan for my cook to follow and a budget monitoring template to record the list of items and actual cost.
3 Week Menu plan ( I gave my cook the liberty to plan our breakfast. What I included is only the lunch for my kids-they eat their lunch in school, my husband and I and our dinner. Every Sunday, I scheduled to eat out as our bonding time with family my family but again we have to stick with our budget not more P700.
You may notice that some are color-coded so it could guide my cook what menu to prepare good for 2 meals( we can just reheat it ). In this way, we can save on gasul and my cook can do other important tasks.
Also, I ask her to buy in bulk or volume to lessen her time going to the market. Except for fish, shell and veggies that need to be served fresh, others like pork, beef can be bought in bulk and stock them in the fridge.
For monitoring of expenses, I designed a template for her to record all her expenses.
On a weekly basis, she has to record all the expenses and another sheet is provided for the breakdown of items like breakfast food items. I provided her an envelope where to keep the receipts for auditing purposes. For the rice and gasul, my monitoring is different as it includes the last date purchased and total kilos of the last purchased. In this way, I can monitor our consumption in a given period. I provided her the template good for 3 weeks so she can reproduce it every time she runs out of copies.
As to the money, I am using one of my ATM - Debit card for this. This is entirely for our household spendings that need cash payment. My cook has been with us for more than 7 years already so I can entrust her the pincode. I give her my ATM every time she needs to replenish her budget.
To empower my children, I assigned the task to my eldest daughter to do the weekly auditing while my 14 year old son is tasked to buy every Saturday our breakfast food items to be consumed the following week.
My reflection: Meal planning and budgeting are important in any household. Our house help needs guidance on what food to prepare and how much budget is allocated. Regular monitoring and review of the actual spending can help reduce expenses and prevent possible misappropriation of funds. Involvement of children in meal planning, monitoring and budgeting is a good life skills training for them.
I will keep you posted on the result of this "measure and manage project" of mine after a month. I hope the result will help me manage our financial resources more effectively.
Happy new year!