We earn £39,000 – how we afford our £1,600 bills and have money left over

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 budget. This week, we hear from a personal trainer and mother of one Daisy Bevis, 32, about how she and her husband spend their £39,000 household income on a family of three. Their daughter is three and Bevis shares her tips online @southcoastmum_. I do one weekly shop which is at Sainsbury’s as we are coeliac and eat gluten free. It means I can collect all of the Nectar points and save them for Christmas so we have a buffer to get some nicer things around that time of the year. I always buy non-branded items and the cheapest white gluten-free loaf of bread. I pick up beef mince in 12 per cent fat, as they’re cheaper than the 5 per cent, and always have sausages to put in the freezer for a back-up dinner if we run out of food that week. Shorts I tend do two bigger shops a month, every other week, which includes household items and cleaning products, like dishwasher tablets and washing powder, and then two food-only ones. I stick to it evening out around £70 per week. Anytime I go in I look for the yellow stickers. There’s usually a dedicated area for discounted items but sometimes you’ll find them with the rest of the products. I often stare at whatever section I’m in for a while until I potentially spot a yellow sticker and then I grab it. Sometimes I use the Rakuten cashback app and do the shop online, it has 4 per cent cash back at the moment. Our cheap go-to dinner is chicken wings, you spend £3 and get a lot of chicken, we then coat them in corn flour, put barbecue sauce on them and put them in the air fryer. They turn into crispy barbecue chicken wings and we make our own chips and salad to go with it. It saves so much money over buying pre-prepared wings and it’s a really good meal. Our daughter is a bit of a beige kid, she will have more of what I would call a picnic dinner – bits of cheese, ham, apple. She’s still not in the sit-down meal phase. Our budget is so tight at the moment. We rent a two-bedroom house in Poole which we got using the council’s rent deposit scheme – they give you your first month’s rent and deposit upront and the rest is up to you. Last year we were homeless living in a motorhome which wasn’t in a great state and we ended up falling into more debt after we ripped it out and couldn’t finish the work. We had no water, no electricity, no kitchen, no toilet and it became impossible with a two-year-old so I declared us homeless. It’s now nice having a place of our own but there’s a pressure every month to make ends meet, we have no family or financial support and no landlord really wanted us as we have a child, a dog and were going through the process of an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA). We did manage to find a private landlord who just wanted someone respectable and we ended up falling on our feet but with five years paying back our IVA of £130 per month and £1,600 on rent, bills and Wi-Fi we’re breaking even. We can’t save for things like birthdays or Christmas – our daughter turned three recently and I got all of her presents from the charity shop, which was very controversial when I posted it online. I cleaned up her dolls, washed their hair, plaited it and made them look nice and that’s the way we’re doing it at the moment, that’s what we can afford to do. We thrift as much as possible – clothes, shoes, you name it. Anything we need we’re trying to get second hand. There’s nothing wrong with it, most of the things in the charity shop are such good quality and they’re just gonna go to the landfill so you’re also saving the planet at the same time. For days out, we do anything free. We’re going to the library a lot, they put crafts on and we’re lucky that we live by the sea so we try to save a little bit for an ice cream which, even that, has become really expensive. It’s around £4 for a Whippy in a cup so instead I’ve been buying the Neapolitan ice cream in Sainsbury’s. The park is another option, we rotate parks and go to different ones for something new and there is always something going on locally. This week there was a free dinosaur hunt in town that we went to. There’s a lot of pressure on families now, especially through social media, to be able to provide more. One other mum commented on my post that she feels so much pressure around her children’s birthday parties and trying to keep up with other mums who are providing bowling parties or the cinema. Gone are the days of cake and musical chairs in the garden. It always seems so much pressure to keep up and lots of families will be comparing to others in the summer holidays too, it’s definitely hard.