We’re on £80,000 a year – we spend £700 a week on childcare and won’t have a holiday

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 public sector worker and mother of three, Bethan Waters, 37, about how she and her 40-year-old husband budget their £80,000 income for a family of five. They have a six-year-old and two-year-old twins. Bethan shares her tips and parenting life online @bethanjennie. We plan all of our meals ahead and we shop in Sainsbury’s so we can save up the Nectar points for Christmas. I shop online as when I’m in store I find myself grabbing extra bits and the total adds up. When I do it online I can think about sticking to the budget which is around £120 per week. I cook dinner everyday, I tried to batch cook but I found that on the day I didn’t fancy what was made and I ended up cooking again. I finish work at 3pm so I’m able to grab the kids and have that time at home to cook something but it’s no masterpiece, it’s not gourmet. The meals we eat are basic, we’re talking sausages, chicken nuggets, spaghetti Bolognese and on Sundays we get a joint of meat, ham or beef. We eat with the kids, so I find myself eating that type of food too. I know it’s not great for me but it’s a period of time in my life that’ll pass. Shorts For go-to quick meals, I love using the air fryer and making breaded chicken with roast potatoes, peas or sweetcorn, something really basic that the kids will eat. At the weekend, we have a “fakeaway” from our usual shop or M&S, usually the microwave curries, and we do that every other weekend as takeaways are just so expensive. If we eat out, we ask for vouchers for our birthdays so we go once every few months. During the day, the kids love the little American-style pancakes you put in the toaster and I have them as a snack. I always add them to the basket with other essentials like wraps, cream cheese, cereal, cucumbers, milk. In our house, a common lunch is tortilla wrap pizzas, we put tomato puree on a wrap, sprinkle on some cheese and pop it in the oven to make a crispy pizza, that’s a favourite. For breakfast we have scrambled eggs or dippy eggs on the weekends. We buy a lot of tinned goods. My daughter has to take fruit into school and we don’t buy fresh for her anymore, I buy tinned pineapple or peaches as it lasts longer. We found fruit was really expensicve, especially as the kids would go through a punnet of raspberries in one go. Switching to tinned or frozen has saved so much money. In her lunchbox, she has sausage rolls or a wrap, cucumber, carrot sticks, yoghurt, crisps and apple juice. We buy much less meat than we used to, I don’t buy mince or chicken so I guess what I get is more processed – sausages, frozen fish or frozen chicken. There are a lot more deals on frozen and it lasts longer, it’s much more convenient too and we can bulk-buy it when it’s on a three for £10 or £12 deal. A lot of our financial pressure comes from having twins. Our six-year-old is easier to entertain but two-year-old twins is pretty intense. When I first went back to work, when the twins were 10 months old, after maternity leave, the childcare bill was more than my salary – it worked out around £1,800 for four days per week. I took the financial hit as I love my job and it was important for me to keep going with my career but it was extortionate. ‘I try to enjoy the nice moments of simplicity like picnics at the park, picking daisies and watching the bees,’ says Bethan When they turned two, they switched nursery and attend four days a week from 9am to 3pm and it’s around £600 for them both. My eldest goes to after school club two days per week which is over £100 so childcare is a huge outgoing, and I do find myself using the credit card more for petrol and things at the end of the month. We have a mortgage, too ,which is £1,200 per month, so that’s also a big pressure. With my eldest, we used to throw big birthday parties, but we don’t do it anymore and the twins haven’t had one. They’re all born between December and January so everyone is more money conscious at that time of the year. We were going to go on holiday as a family of five but we’ve decided that I’m going to take my eldest alone. The twins can’t sit at the table, or swim, and they get tired, so it’s more cost-effective for me and her to go away for a few days. She can enjoy the culture more and enjoy those later nights. If we go on days out, we wait for deals and take a picnic. We went to a National Trust park recently using a voucher in a paper, or we tend to go to places where the twins are still free. Days out in general are few and far between, we’d rather go to the park for a few hours. I try to enjoy the nice moments of simplicity like picnics at the park, picking daisies and watching the bees. I find when we go out there’s so much pressure to enjoy it, as it’s a big effort for us to go, but when you strip it back to something simple the pressure isn’t there, and you’re not spending £100 on a day out. As parents, we put pressure on ourselves to do more than perhaps we need to do because social media is showing a lot of days out – but actually, what I remember as a child is walking miles with my grandma and her telling me all about the trees. Now I walk with my daughter and tell her what the trees are and that’s what it’s about.