We’re a family of three – the surprising way we save on the weekly shop

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 marketing professional Elen Notley, 34, about how she and her husband, a teacher, budget their outgoings for a family of three. Their daughter is almost three. Two years ago we moved back to Cardiff, my home city, from the countryside to be close to my family, but it means our housing costs have increased. Our mortgage is £1,700, which is £400 more than it used to be in the countryside, and for less space. We have Sky, which is a big cost, council tax, car insurance on two cars and utilities. We have tried to reduce our bills in any way that we can. We recently changed our life insurance as we felt we were paying too much but utilities alone have increased a lot. Our water bill used to be £30 per month and it’s more than doubled now. We have no savings at the end of the month even with two full-time incomes. Both our incomes just cover our outgoings. We budget £120 per week for food for the three of us and £45 of that goes on four Hello Fresh dinners per week. We order for two people and then split it between the three of us as my daughter won’t eat a full-sized portion. We bulk them out a little. For example, if we get a chicken pasta recipe we’ll add in some supermarket pasta that we have at home. Shorts It’s a lot more convenient. The mental load of working out what we’re going to eat on a Monday or a Tuesday is taken away and we’re just having these ready-made recipes we’ve chosen. It also works out cheaper. If we went to the supermarket every day (as we don’t do a weekly shop due to being time-poor) it ends up being more expensive due to the things you pick up and are tempted to buy. We only pop to the shops on a Sunday for lunch items and when we need things like toilet rolls and bin bags. Our four Hello Fresh meals between us are currently £45 per week. On a Friday afternoon when I’m with my daughter, we go to Tesco to get food for the weekend, which is our go-to supermarket. We save the Clubcard vouchers up for our Christmas shop, which is a big help when we’re hosting. The staples we always buy include pasta; our little one loves pasta so it’s always on the list, and rice. She’ll eat curry and also bolognese which is a winner in our house. We also always buy the Arla bio milk for her, as it’s fortified with vitamins. We have a local milkman who comes on a Monday and Friday which is better for the environment, especially because the milkman takes back our used glass bottles, and it costs £8.72 for eight pints of milk per week. Breakfasts are usually cereal and a banana on a weekday and scrambled eggs and beans on the weekend. For lunches, we do a packed lunch for my daughter and husband and the fan favourites are ready-made Spanish tortillas, and cucumber sticks and veggie straws. They’re always on the shopping list. I tend to eat any leftovers from dinner the night before or eggs on toast as I work from home. We’re definitely aware of the rising costs; we used to have steak every Saturday but we stopped as the cost is just crazy. We could almost get a takeaway for the same price. We also now only do meals out or takeaways for special occasions like birthdays, or if it’s a treat from a parent. We have recently discovered an app called The Eat Club though, where restaurants, if they’re not completely full, try to fill their tables and you can get up to 40 per cent off the food bill. The price of chocolate is another one. We used to share a bar every evening, which isn’t the healthiest but we’re big fans of Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate but it’s so expensive now, around £4 a bar, that we’ve stopped. To save money, we used some Christmas vouchers to buy a coffee machine so we stop buying them out which used to be a splurge. Now our luxury spend is a decent gym membership which has a swimming pool we can take our daughter to for free as she’s under four. We do a lot of beach days around South Wales which are always a winner too but even ice cream has massively gone up. A cone from the ice cream van is now £5 and our daughter is obsessed with it. If she sees a van it’s always an added expense. I work full-time and have done since my daughter was one. I do four longer days Monday to Thursday and just the morning on a Friday morning but even then the childcare costs are crippling. Our new Government are rolling out free childcare but we’re still not getting that. We do the tax-free childcare, so we get a 20 per cent top up on the price we pay. Our daughter attends what we call a cylch meithrin which is like a play group that promotes the Welsh language. It’s run by a national charity in Wales so the fees are lower than a standard nursey, £19 per session, but she does that three days per week, 2.5 hours a time. On Friday afternoons she’s with me, two days a week she’s at the childminders (£60 per day) and then she splits the rest of our working time between my mum and sister.