I’m a mum of three – even with cheap fruit and frozen pizza our weekly shop is £200

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, mother-of-three Vineta Senberga, 46, tells Kia-Elise Green about how she and her husband, in his early fifties, budget their household income for a family of five. Their twin daughters are aged nine, and their son is 10 months old. We run on a weekly food budget of around £200 which also covers baby items like nappies and our household cleaning items. We shop online, and have two deliveries per week, with a bigger one at the weekend and a smaller top-up in the week to carry us through. It’s only occasional that we go in store to top up on milk, for example. Shorts We mainly shop at Tesco and for top-ups it’s Sainsbury’s, as it’s close to us. We get fresh meat, like chicken and mince, and snacks like Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese, rice cakes and peanut butter for the children. If I spot reduced fruit or berries while I’m in the store, I grab those as all three children love berries. We’d love to have them all the time but they disappear very quickly, they’re probably one of the most expensive items in the food shop. We buy fresh and cook from scratch most days. That said, we keep basics like chicken nuggets and fish fingers in for the days we don’t want to cook. One day a week we have pizza, frozen or ready made. We share the cooking between us, but since the baby has got a little older and I’m at home, I often prepare dinner during the day, although my husband is the better cook. We don’t specifically batch-cook but we nearly always make more than we need and have leftovers for lunch the next day, or for another dinner. For breakfast, the children usually have cereal with milk, and at weekends we make porridge. Three days per week the twins have packed lunches (and school dinners on the other two days) and we vary between sandwiches, wraps or bagels, along with yoghurt, fruit and a small treat like a mini-pack of Party Rings, or a madeleine. We try to follow the basic principle: protein, fruit or vegetables and carbohydrates. For the twins, we also tend to buy crisps like Pom-Bears or Walkers Baked, biscuits like Rich Tea and baby rice cakes for our little one. We sometimes pick up breakfast bars or popcorn for the weekends. For warmer weather, we keep frozen lollies in the freezer, too. Meat can be expensive but it does tend to be good value, as one meal feeds all five of us and provides leftovers. Snacks add up surprisingly fast, a few packets here and there doesn’t look like much individually but they make a noticeable difference to our food shop total. We rent a three-bedroom house in London, which is £2,050 per month. Once the council tax, utilities, phone, insurance and the TV licence are added our core household bills alone come to around £2,652 before we’ve purchased any food. Honestly, the main way we save money as a family is by not going out too much. It’s rare we can eat out (we might order a pizza or eat out once a month at most but it’s always basic not fancy). Every time you take a family out, it’s easy to spend £100 between one activity and a meal, so the biggest saving is just not going. We do a lot of free activities – parks, bikes, tennis or playing with a ball. I don’t think children need constant entertainment. Some of the things my twins have enjoyed most over the years have been the simple things: board games, crafts, reading, drawing or building dens. I think boredom is underrated as it can lead to them creating something themselves. I used to buy clothes for myself and the children from Vinted but more often than not, the items weren’t right – they were too worn, the wrong size, or just not what I expected. In the end, I found that I was spending time and money on things that never got used, so I stopped browsing, and I now buy less. There are a lot of things we conciously don’t spend money on. We don’t do paid baby classes, I colour my own hair and do my own nails rather than paying for regular salon appointments. We don’t buy bottled water because we use a filter at home instead, and we don’t replace our phones just because our contract ends. If something still works, we keep using it. If we pay for something like a trampoline park, it has to be an occasion. Something we splurge on is good shoes for all of us because, although we have a car, we walk a lot and poor-quality shoes never seem to last. Our approach is simple: we’re happy to spend money on things that make daily life better, but are less interested in things are temporary, trendy or don’t add much true value to our lives.