We earn £75,000 – but can only afford to save £20 a month

The average UK household is spending nearly £119 per week on food shopping, amounting to more than £6,000 per year, and for families with children, the cost can increase to £170 weekly. The rising prices mean many people have had to make sacrifices and 61 per cent of adults claim they’ve had to cut back on buying certain items, and more than two in five claim the cost of food has affected their ability to save.

In a new series, The i Paper asks families how they budget their weekly food shop. This week, we hear from Sylvie Frankel, a 41-year-old mother of four in Derbyshire, on how she and her husband, 45, budget their £75,000 household income between them and their four children, aged 19, 15, three and one.

Both my husband and I do the food shopping, and we spend around £800 a month. We try to do one big weekly shop but sometimes we only manage to do a big food shop every other week. Each one costs between £200 and £300.

My husband cooks most of the time. I’m the main worker and he looks after the children. He works (he runs a business with his dad repairing and servicing garden machinery) but I work longer hours. I do the budgeting for the household, as I’m a senior finance business partner, and I have a business working with women with ADHD and their finances.

Our main shop is usually at Lidl and Aldi but we top up at Sainsbury’s or Asda. There are certain things, like the almond milk I drink, that I don’t like from Aldi, but overall, it’s cheaper so we go there. I’m German and so Lidl tends to have a lot of the foods that I’m used to. I also prefer their meat; I think it tastes better as I find a lot of it has less water in it. It’s not more convenient, though. Tesco is the closest big shop to us.

I often have to go to different shops to get things the whole family will eat and I often need more than one trolley. It’s expensive – we’re stressed in general about how expensive everything is and the rise in energy prices recently announced isn’t helping either.

We try to plan our meals to avoid food waste, but it can be dependent on what you end up with. Sometimes the fruit we buy will last a week and other times we have to throw it away after two days, which can be frustrating.

We try to cook from scratch, but we always have a couple of things in the freezer that are either pre-cooked or easy to throw in the microwave, like frozen vegetables. We try to batch cook but it doesn’t always work. We find ourselves scrambling to cook something that’s quick from the freezer on the days that the kids are in nursery because they come home completely shattered. They just want to eat and go to bed.

For breakfast, we mostly have porridge and sometimes cereal like Rice Krispies or multi-grain shapes. For lunch, we often have leftovers from the night before or salad and sandwiches. I work hybrid and take leftovers into work or buy the Aldi ready meals, like the lasagna or rice dishes, for around £1.50. I always have a couple of those in the freezer to grab.

We rarely buy snack items but we have a lot of fruit and yoghurt. The children have avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (AFRID) which means there are a lot of sensory food difficulties, so sometimes meals are as simple as plain pasta. Their lunches are usually packed sandwiches.

Most of the food budget goes on meat. I have a chronic iron deficiency, so my husband makes sure I have steak every other week, which costs quite a lot. All the kids eat chicken, so that’s a regular thing that we buy. We also buy a lot of mince, and the rest of our budget probably goes on fruit and vegetables. We have both fresh and frozen but we save the frozen vegetables for last-minute meals when we need something to tuck into. I try to buy organic broccoli and cauliflower and the kids love bananas and berries, so we have those a lot.

Everything has gotten more expensive: one of my children likes a specific type of pizza. It used to be 95p and now it’s £1.50. The pork mince I buy used to be £3 and now it’s £3.50.

The one thing we have cut back on is takeaways in the last three years. We used to have one every week but now it’s once every two or three months. We rarely go out for dinner, but we do go out with our youngest two for our anniversary, to avoid childcare costs. It’s also hard to find childcare. To save money at Christmas, we go out for one nice meal instead of presents to each other.

We have a five-bedroom detached property, and our monthly outgoings, including the bills and mortgage, are around £1,400. Our mortgage is £1,060. The bills have gone up over the past few years, the mortgage has just increased by £260 because our five-year fixed rate ended and we’ve gone from 1.7 per cent to over four. We pay £50 more on council tax than we did when we bought the house in 2020. Luckily, electricity and gas haven’t gone up majorly for us, around 10 per cent in the last six years.

My eldest daughter is at university and we still pay for her. It’s a bit of a flexible allowance. She still asks for a lot of things and she gets them. We try to give her £200 every month, £80 the first week and £40 afterwards but it always works out more than that. She also gets her maintenance loan for her accommodation and personal independence payments for her disability. She’s in a wheelchair and has a car, which costs a lot.

Overall, we probably pay about £700 a month for her, because she’s not very good with money and we have to top her up; sometimes it can be more. I’ve also got two kids at nursery, which also costs about £800 a month. They both go to nursery for three full days while my husband is at work.

I’ve got a workplace pension and my husband puts money in his ISA and tries to put some money away for the children. It’s very flexible. This is probably the same for every family, but we feel that there’s a lot more unexpected expenses recently. We try to wait for a lighter month, February and March usually work very well when we don’t have council tax to pay, as we pay it over 10 months. Sometimes we only save £20, other months it might be £50. There’s not a huge amount left each month.

The one thing we do splurge on is a cleaner every other week, although I wish it were once a week. She’s my lifeline but we can barely afford it. She started with us last year after I had a C-section. I already had a mobility disability but it’s gotten progressively worse, so I struggle doing anything in the house and my husband can’t do it all himself.

The cleaner is the best decision we’ve made, but it’s more than we probably should splurge on. It’s £20 an hour and she comes for three hours every other week.