{"id":610912,"date":"2026-05-29T20:14:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T20:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/610912\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T20:14:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T20:14:17","slug":"we-earn-75000-but-can-only-afford-to-save-20-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/610912\/","title":{"rendered":"We earn \u00a375,000 – but can only afford to save \u00a320 a month"},"content":{"rendered":"

The average UK household<\/a> is spending nearly \u00a3119 per week on food shopping, amounting to more than \u00a36,000 per year, and for families with children, the cost can increase to \u00a3170 weekly. The rising prices mean many people have had to make sacrifices and 61 per cent of adults claim they\u2019ve had to cut back on buying certain items, and more than two in five claim the cost of food has affected their ability to save.<\/p>\n

In a new series, The i Paper asks families how they budget their weekly food shop. This week, we hear from Sylvie Frankel, a 41-year-old mother of four in Derbyshire, on how she and her husband, 45, budget their \u00a375,000 household income between them and their four children, aged 19, 15, three and one.<\/p>\n

Both my husband and I do the food shopping, and we spend around \u00a3800 a month. We try to do one big weekly shop<\/a> but sometimes we only manage to do a big food shop every other week. Each one costs between \u00a3200 and \u00a3300.<\/p>\n

My husband cooks most of the time. I\u2019m the main worker and he looks after the children. He works (he runs a business with his dad repairing and servicing garden machinery) but I work longer hours. I do the budgeting for the household, as I\u2019m a senior finance business partner, and I have a business working with women with AuDHD who are business owners on using their finances for business strategy.<\/p>\n

Our main shop is usually at Lidl and Aldi but we top up at Sainsbury\u2019s or Asda. There are certain things, like the almond milk I drink, that I don\u2019t like from Aldi, but overall, it\u2019s cheaper so we go there. I\u2019m German and so Lidl tends to have a lot of the foods that I\u2019m used to. I also prefer their meat; I think it tastes better as I find a lot of it has less water in it. It\u2019s not more convenient, though. Tesco is the closest big shop to us.<\/p>\n

I often have to go to different shops<\/a> to get things the whole family will eat and I often need more than one trolley. It\u2019s expensive \u2013 we\u2019re stressed in general about how expensive everything is and the rise in energy prices recently announced isn\u2019t helping either.<\/p>\n

We try to plan our meals to avoid food waste, but it can be dependent on what you end up with. Sometimes the fruit we buy will last a week and other times we have to throw it away after two days, which can be frustrating.<\/p>\n

We try to cook from scratch, but we always have a couple of things in the freezer that are either pre-cooked or easy to throw in the microwave. We try to batch cook but it doesn\u2019t always work. We find ourselves scrambling to cook something that\u2019s quick from the freezer on the days that the kids are in nursery because they come home completely shattered. They just want to eat and go to bed.<\/p>\n

For breakfast, we mostly have porridge and sometimes cereal like Rice Krispies or multi-grain shapes. For lunch, we often have leftovers from the night before or salad and sandwiches. I work hybrid and take leftovers into work or buy the Aldi ready meals for around \u00a31.50. I always have a couple of those in the freezer to grab.<\/p>\n

We rarely buy snack items but we have a lot of fruit and yoghurt. The children have avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (AFRID) which means there are a lot of sensory food difficulties, so sometimes meals are as simple as plain pasta. Their lunches are usually packed sandwiches.<\/p>\n

Most of the food budget<\/a> goes on meat. I have a chronic iron deficiency, so my husband makes sure I have steak every other week, which costs quite a lot. All the kids eat chicken, so that\u2019s a regular thing that we buy. We also buy a lot of mince, and the rest of our budget probably goes on fruit and vegetables. We have both fresh and frozen but we save the frozen vegetables for last-minute meals when we need something to tuck into. I try to buy organic broccoli and cauliflower and the kids love bananas and berries.<\/p>\n

Everything has gotten more expensive: one of my children likes a specific type of pizza. It used to be 95p and now it\u2019s \u00a31.50. The pork mince I buy used to be \u00a33 and now it\u2019s \u00a33.50.<\/p>\n

The one thing we have cut back on is takeaways in the last three years. We used to have one every week but now it\u2019s once every two or three months. We rarely go out for dinner, but we do go out with our youngest two for our anniversary, as it\u2019s hard to find childcare in our village. To save money at Christmas, we go out for one nice meal instead of presents to each other.<\/p>\n

We have a five-bedroom detached property, and our mortgage is \u00a31,060. Overall our outgoings total between \u00a35,000 and \u00a36,000. The bills have gone up over the past few years, the mortgage has just increased by \u00a3260 because our five-year fixed rate ended and we\u2019ve gone from 1.7 per cent to over four. We pay \u00a350 more on council tax than we did when we bought the house in 2020. Luckily, electricity and gas haven\u2019t gone up majorly for us, around 10 per cent in the last six years.<\/p>\n

My eldest daughter is at university and we still pay for her. It\u2019s a bit of a flexible allowance. She still asks for a lot of things and she gets them. We try to give her \u00a3200 every month, \u00a380 the first week and \u00a340 afterwards but it always works out more than that for her to afford her rent and meals. She also gets her maintenance loan for her accommodation and personal independence payments for her disability. She\u2019s in a wheelchair and has a car, which costs a lot.<\/p>\n

Overall, we probably pay about \u00a3700 a month for her. I\u2019ve also got two kids at nursery, which also costs about \u00a3800 a month. They both go to nursery for three full days while my husband is at work.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got a workplace pension<\/a> and my husband puts money in his ISA and tries to put some money away for the children. It\u2019s very flexible. This is probably the same for every family, but we feel that there\u2019s a lot more unexpected expenses recently. We try to wait for a lighter month, February and March usually work very well when we don\u2019t have council tax to pay, as we pay it over 10 months. Sometimes we only save \u00a320, other months it might be \u00a350. There\u2019s not a huge amount left each month.<\/p>\n

The one thing we do splurge on is a cleaner<\/a> every other week, although I wish it were once a week. She\u2019s my lifeline but we can barely afford it. She started with us last year after I had a C-section. I already had a mobility disability but it\u2019s gotten progressively worse, so I struggle doing anything in the house and my husband can\u2019t do it all himself.<\/p>\n

The cleaner is the best decision we\u2019ve made, but it\u2019s more than we probably should splurge on. It\u2019s \u00a320 an hour and she comes for three hours every other week.<\/p>\n

As told to Kia-Elise Green<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The average UK household is spending nearly \u00a3119 per week on food shopping, amounting to more than \u00a36,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,242,4176,612,2201,4174,4175,719,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-610912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-features","tag-finance","tag-food-and-drink","tag-parenting","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-supermarkets","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}