I feed my family of four for £45 per week – and my ‘one mile rule’ keeps costs down

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 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 budget. This week, we hear from a mother-of-two, Ami, 33, based in Bristol, about how she and her partner, 39, keep their family’s food shop under £160 per month for their children, five and two. They own a camper van conversion company together, and she shares her family budgeting online. I buy the ‘Too-Good-to-Waste” boxes from Lidl, which include fruit and vegetables for around £2. I buy that when I pass the shop on a Sunday; the contents last us the week, and then I’ll plan the meals around what’s in that and then go for a bigger shop on the Monday. Kids eat a lot of fruit – and it’s expensive – so when I need extra I tend to buy grapes and apples and things that last longer. The kids love strawberries and raspberries, and we do occasionally get them, but if it’s going to be eaten throughout the week, then I tend to buy the other stuff that isn’t going to go off as quickly. My main Monday shop is usually Lidl, Aldi or Sainsbury’s and we don’t buy brands. My kids wouldn’t even question brands; they don’t think twice about it. If it tastes like ketchup, that’s that. Shorts I spend on average £45 per week but I tend to do a bigger shop at the beginning of the month to top up on everything that we need, which is around £70, and then more £20-£30 shops later on. Sometimes it only costs £8 as we just need a few ingredients, bread or milk. It always works out to around £160 per month. We cook each day; I don’t tend to batch cook, but there will be leftovers from meals that’ll last two days. A lot of the time we eat things you cook in a big tray and it will last for lunch and another dinner. We eat a lot of vegetarian meals and hearty meals like lasagna, spaghetti bolognese, cottage pie and pasta dishes. We all eat the same thing. We don’t cook twice or cook kids meals; we did baby-led weaning with both children and they both weaned by eating what we were eating. Our 10-minute meal is a chickpea stew. It’s just a tin of chickpeas, a tin of chopped tomatoes, a few spices and I do it with couscous, and the whole meal takes 10 minutes. I just boil the kettle, put couscous in a pan and leave it covered for the 10 minutes. Sometimes I put other things from the cupboards in like veggies or raisins that the kids have as snacks. In 10 minutes it’s on the table in front of you and I do it with a bit of garlic bread. It’s really nice, it’s just one of those that we all enjoy. I base each meal around a protein, but that protein can be chickpeas or it could be chicken. I will eat bits of meat now and again but it’s cheaper not to, so we buy reduced meat and freeze it. To replace meat, we use cheese for protein, or Quorn products, and a lot of pulses like beans. Breakfast is cereal, croissants or porridge, which is what my kids love and for lunch my five-year-old has the free lunches at school. My two-year-old goes to preschool three days a week (which is £2 per day) and has a packed lunch, which is a standard sandwich, wrap or pitta with crisps and a yoghurt. I always cook from scratch; for snacks I’ll do things like homemade pinwheels and cheese twists. I make them every couple of weeks and freeze them but we have a few things like cereal bars and fruit flakes. I bake Pizza pinwheels with a roll of puff pastry and it makes around 12 little pinwheels which costs around £1.10 to make them all. We don’t waste anything; if we have vegetables going off, I chuck it all in a soup maker, add an onion and a stock cube and make soup for our lunches for that week. That said we get frozen vegetables a lot. People think frozen food is bad but a lot of the time it’s fresher than the fresh food in the supermarket. We’ve always got peas, sweet corn, broccoli and green beans in the freezer but carrots I buy fresh. The thing I don’t buy anymore is Cadbury’s chocolate, the price is ridiculous. Even the cheap Morrison’s bar of chocolate is now £1.20. You used to be able to buy a bar of chocolate for 20p. I can’t remember the last time I had a bar of chocolate because I am not paying £3 when I know that I can get a whole box of fruit and veg for £2. We do a lot of free days out and if our friends are meeting up, I’ll always suggest the free things. We’ve got the Wave in Bristol, which is a really nice place that you can go for free. We’ve got Grimsby Farm and our libraries do Lego Club and Craft Club and Rhyme Time three times a week, which is free. We’ve always got things up our sleeve, so I know we can get out the house on a rainy day and not have to pay for it. We also walk a lot more since fuel has gone up to ridiculous prices. I have a rule that if it’s less than one mile, I’ll walk it. We also try to car share or I’ll go on public transport with the boys when kids go free because it works out cheaper than driving and parking, and they enjoy going on the buses. I always think about money-saving ways to do things outside of our bills. We own our home on the outskirts of Bristol, and the mortgage is around £1000 per month, but the gas and electricity have increased. We’ve had a heat pump and solar panels installed last year to hopefully decrease it a bit. If we do go on a more expensive day out, we will always take a picnic. My kids don’t ask for food when we’re out and about; they do have an ice cream, but it’s never assumed that we’re going to sit in a cafe or a restaurant. It’s always a case of finding discount codes and two-for-one tickets. I don’t think we ever pay full price for anything as there’s always a code or a saving. It’s the same with birthdays and Christmas as both my boys are in December. I always buy things when I see them on offer; we went to an outlet the other day and there was a shop that had puzzles and games for £1, which I bought and put away. I have a spreadsheet where I work out the costs of what I’ve spent but often the value is much higher than what I’ve actually spent. One year I bought my son a remote-controlled car reduced from £60 to £6 in the sale. That was his main present. The kids have everything they ask for; they don’t miss out. We do a lot of camping trips – which are obviously much cheaper than a holiday abroad – but we don’t miss out. I looked at going abroad but it was £2500 for us all to go and I’d only be stressing and worrying about the pool or it being too hot for them, so I booked six holidays in the UK for £477 instead, including weeklong camping holidays and weekend trips. We went to Breen for three days and the whole trip cost us £118 pounds for food, our campsite pitch, arcade money, soft play and the pier. I find easy ways to maximise savings on everyday spending without missing out. I’ve always been savvy. I’ve worked since I was 14 and have always been pretty good with money so I could always buy everything I wanted. The first thing I bought with my wages was a pair of GHD straighteners that I still use now at 33, almost 20 years later. We live in such a throwaway society, but they still work so why am I going to replace them? I feel like we don’t miss out on anything; we do everything we want to do, but we just do it in money-saving ways.