We earn £80,000 but can’t afford takeaway, coffees or holidays abroad

The average UK household is spending nearly £119 per week on food shopping, amounting to more than £6,000 per year. For families with children, the cost can increase to £170 weekly. Rising costs mean that 61 per cent of the people in the UK claim they’ve had to cut back. In a new series, The i Paper asks families how they manage their weekly food shop. This week, we hear from a homelessness council worker and mother-of-three Rebecca Doyle, 30, about how she and her 40-year-old husband budget their £80,000 household income for a family of five. Their children are eight, four and one and she shares her tips online @bexandthegirlgang. My husband and I both have very busy jobs. We share all of the expenses but I do all of the budgeting and tracking. We shop around different supermarkets – we don’t have a fixed choice – but we’re really noticing the pinch. Sometimes I get a Sainsbury’s delivery but mostly we shop at Aldi as it’s cheaper. I try and budget around £160 per week for food. I do one big shop a week but we still spend around £30 a week in a little Tesco around the corner on extra bits. Shorts We’ve done an Ocado shop before when we had 25 per cent off as it is a similar price to our usual shop. I chase the offers and yellow stickers on everything which my husband hates, but I love. I tend not to buy the cheapest meat or eggs, I like better quality and free range. But I save money on things like wonky berries. The branded items I buy are mostly for the kids like cheese strings and Dunkers but I bulk buy them when they’re on offer. When I was on maternity leave I went to a food pantry, it’s not a food bank but it’s a step up from that. You pay £5 for an annual membership and £7 for a basket of shopping for a discount, it’s either short-dated or supermarkets overbought. We struggled a lot for the last few months, and it helped loads. We used to be vegan and we still don’t have meat with every meal. We have veggie sausages as the frozen ones are much cheaper than fresh meat. We don’t eat much red meat like steak as it’s so expensive, and stick to chicken thighs as they’re definitely cheaper. One of the areas we spend on is fruit and vegetables – we want to keep our children as healthy as possible. I get frozen fruit and we make it into smoothies or put it in yoghurts. As we live in quite a rural area in the North West, we go picking for blackberries in the summer and get as much free fruit as we can. It’s like a free day out and the kids love it. For breakfast, we usually have toast in the car on the way to school; my husband and I also make protein smoothies in the blender. Our eldest two children have packed lunches, our youngest has hers included in her nursery fees. My husband and I are hybrid workers and work in the same building. Around two years ago, we used to get lunch out together once a week, it was about £15 for the two of us but now it’s around £30 and we just can’t afford it. Instead, we get a £3.79 meal deal from Boots and eat it together in the office, or have leftovers. We love coffee – my husband used to get a daily coffee on the way to work but when we sat down it was adding up to over £100 a month which is insane. For Christmas last year, I bought him a coffee machine, which was a splurge, but it works out much cheaper. We spend around £20 a month on the beans. For dinner, the kids have a lot of jacket potatoes with beans and cheese and we do pizza wraps – a tortilla wrap, tomato puree and I let them sprinkle on cheese and toppings. It’s done after five minutes in the oven and it’s fun and easy for everybody. We eat a lot of pasta, curries and stir fries – we make a big pan and then have it for lunch and even another dinner. Once a week, we have a treat meal – we’ll make our own pizza dough or curry, or do homemade Nando’s – grilled chicken with spicy sauce, rice and vegetables. We’ve cut back on takeaways – they used to be quick and easy, but it doesn’t feel like a treat anymore because of the financial pinch. Even for one person you can easily spend £20, plus fees to deliver. For childcare, we’re lucky to have family help and we qualify for the 30 hours of free childcare but we only do it in term time. If it wasn’t for our parents, I couldn’t have afforded to go back to work. In the holidays we juggle our annual leave and request flexible working, so we often work evenings and weekends to make up our hours. This summer, I’ve booked off every Monday and Tuesday and we have grandparents and other family chipping in to help us out. Our holidays are usually camping or a caravan trip. This year, we took the kids abroad for the first time – we drove and took the ferry to Paris. On the weekends we do a lot of park trips and we pay £14.10 per month for National Trust memberships. We have sinking funds for our yearly expenses, like the kids birthdays, our cars and our MOTs. We also have an emergency fund so when our washing machine broke around six months ago it was the first time ever we didn’t put it on a credit card, as we had a few hundred pounds saved up. We have a stocks and shares ISA but we haven’t really touched it – we bought our house 18 months ago, so we’re still in the early stages of getting our teeth into the mortgage, which is £1,200 a month. Our total monthly outgoings are around £4,000. One thing I do is use cashback on everything. I use Sprive and get it for the mortgage, it’s only 2 per cent but if you spend £600 a month on food, that’s £12 towards the mortgage. You usually get a nice chunk of money back on things like car and home insurance too. One thing we don’t buy much of is clothes. I buy all the children’s on Vinted or eBay bundles and, if they’ve worn them and they’re in good condition, I’ll sell them on. We accept help, too. I think some people are embarrassed but things are getting tighter and tighter. If someone is giving something away for free, say yes. If they’re offering to watch the kids, say yes. I put that energy back out. When we have spare things in the cupboard, I bake cookies for the neighbours or give old toys to the little boy on our street. Things like that help, it’s how the world used to work. I think we’ve lost that sense of community around parenting and finances. We all work so hard in our own vacuum, but we forget that there’s people around us that need help.