We earn £70,000 – but still can’t afford a full shop in Asda

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 project manager and mother-of-two, Alex Dickson, 36, about how she and her 37-year-old husband budget their £70,000 household income for a family of four. Their children are 15 and 11 and she shares her tips online @irlwithalex. Our monthly outgoings are around £3,000, which includes paying for our rented three-bedroom semi-detached council house, all our bills, food, and clubs – like my son’s football. When the kids were young, I stayed home with them and my husband, who works at a nuclear power station, would work long hours. After my second son was born, I got a degree in IT and graduated last year, and now work in a project management role, which has helped our disposable income a lot and allowed us to have those extra treats. Together we earn as a household about £70,000 for our family of four. Shorts All four of us do the weekly food shop because I find that when I allow the kids to pick the snacks and lunch they want for school, we have less food waste. We go to three different supermarkets – Aldi for our main shop, Home Bargains for a few extra cleaning products and Asda for some branded products. We used to budget £100 per week but that’s now doubled to £200 and that’s us buying the same amount of food. We have to travel to a different town to shop in Aldi but it works out cheaper than doing a full shop in Asda alone, which is around £220 for less food than we’d usually buy. Before we shop, we check the cupboards, fridge and freezer so we can make a plan for our dinners that week. We tend to eat a lot of the same things; our 11-year-old has food sensitivities and can be particular about textures, so we have to plan around that. His packed lunches can be expensive and there’s probably too much processed food in there but I’m not going to argue with what he eats. I cook fresh every night for me and the two boys and my husband batch cooks his own lunches and dinners. He usually has fried beef or chicken mince with vegetables and rice. The go-to meals for us are tacos; we’re big on those, and we love chicken mince with fajita seasoning and vegetables that we have with rice or in a salad bowl. Spaghetti Bolognese is a big hit in the house too and chilli with nachos. Breakfast is a huge mix; we are cereal lovers but we tend to also have eggs with diced peppers and mushrooms. On Sundays, we have a cooked breakfast and get haggis, black pudding, sausages and bacon in. For lunches, my children are the opposite. My eldest goes to the gym and likes getting protein; he usually has rolls with cottage cheese, chicken and salad, protein yoghurts and a protein bar and my youngest has cooked chicken pieces from Asda, a packet of crisps and a fruit pot. In Asda, we buy the branded Graham’s yoghurts or Ufit shakes and our meat as it feels better quality. Everything else we buy non-branded from Aldi, like biscuits, tinned foods, chopped tomatoes and a few snacks. We are a big snack family so we always have breadsticks, cream cheese dips, carrot sticks and chocolate in. I always buy bags of frozen diced vegetables and I put them through most meals at dinner time. I love bulking up meals with them as it makes it last longer (and my husband or I can have the leftovers for lunch) and it reduces our food waste and my youngest son, who typically doesn’t eat much veg, doesn’t really notice them. Fruit, I only buy to last for a few days at a time, and on Wednesday I’ll do a top-up shop in a local Co-op to buy more. I save around £50 from our weekly budget for the top-up to get that and any other bits we might need. One thing that has made our fruit last longer is washing it all and putting it into sealed tubs and jars as now we can get around four days out of strawberries. Before, they could sometimes go off overnight in the fridge. We don’t do takeaways much as a family; we’re all into fitness but if we’re craving one, we have mac and cheese at home, which is also our “quick dinner” if we’re in a rush. My husband and I have a strict budget, and we account for all of our money each month so we’re not wasting it, but we do treat ourselves when we can. For me, that’s usually nails and hair, or clothes and trainers. I do use Vinted a lot. If we want something new, I’ll always check the app first. I bargain hunt and wait for sales. We buy winter clothes in summer and summer clothes in winter to save. Recently, I managed to get a new pair of Vans for my son for £5, never worn and in the box. What helped me was not giving in to the pressure and not being involved in a competition of who can buy their kids the most; that’s what used to happen, and I got into a lot of debt that we’re paying back now.