I saved £1,700 a month and halved my food bill with rigid, non negotiable household rules. Spring cleaning my family’s finances has truly been life-changing

Our family’s finances reached breaking point at the end of last year. On top of the usual Christmas expenses, my son’s birthday is in December, making that period particularly tough financially.

Also, when you start allowing a lot of unnecessary expenses to drift into the family budget without you noticing, we, like many other families, become victims of lifestyle deterioration. Not to mention the fact that everything is getting expensive fast. Things we once bought without a second thought (Lurpak, anyone?) have now become nearly unaffordable luxuries. Suddenly, we began to wonder why our regular income no longer fully covered everything.

Many families like ours are already feeling the pinch of ever-increasing costs of living, and things will only get worse as the war continues in the Middle East. Earlier this month average petrol prices hit an 18-month high of 140.6p per litre, and forecasters are warning a surge in energy prices could occur at any time.

When I added up our monthly expenses at the beginning of this year, I was shocked to see that they had increased significantly. I’m the founder of Investing Insiders, a financial education platform that gives people advice on how to make the most of their money, so I really should have known better. But while balancing our busy jobs with raising our two children, ages 15 and 17, my marketing husband, Tim, and I had let things get out of control.

Knowing that a serious action plan was necessary, I examined the family budget and divided our expenses into three categories. Fixed expenses that are essential, such as mortgage, utilities, and phone bills, and usually amount to a similar amount each month.

Variables like food, toiletries, and transportation that we need but may have some impact on. Then optional costs including socialising, takeaways and hair appointments. This is where I knew I could save the most money.

My intention was just to cut costs for January but we saved so much money (about £1,700 a month) that I stuck with it.

I discovered we were spending £400 a month on eating out and takeaways – and I’m not talking about anything fancy, just basic Chinese sometimes – and that stopped. The hard part is being around friends who don’t need to save. We all have that one friend who likes to choose from the bottom of the wine list or insists on dining at that expensive restaurant you’ve studiously avoided like the plague. But seeing our bank balance improve is the motivation that keeps me going.

I’m putting an end to Amazon impulse buys. It’s awful to admit, but we were earning £200 a month, Antonia says

Antonia also reduced her haircuts from every six weeks to every 12 weeks

We stopped buying expensive coffee. While we had a perfectly good machine at home, Tim would run to school and buy a coffee for around £4; This instantly saved us £40 a month.

We were a two-car family and I got rid of an old Ford S-Max and scrapped it for £350. We subsequently saved £400 a month on running costs.

Feeding kids is incredibly expensive, especially my 6-foot-2 son. I was spending £5 a day or £100 a month on expensive protein bars for the kids’ school snacks! I now make a traybake of oats and peanut butter; This takes ten minutes, costs £7.50 and lasts all week.

It’s hard to put a monetary value on all the little purchases young people talk you into, such as sweet treats in shops after dinner, but I’d estimate it easily comes to around £50 a month. I told them not to ask for new clothes unless they were ready to earn money from housework. For example, emptying and cleaning their bins every day for a week will save them £20. But far from costing me money, we saved money because, frankly, they didn’t do any of that.

Then I stop all Amazon impulse buys. It sucks to admit it but we were earning £200 a month. I introduced the 48 hour rule; this is the amount of time you have to leave something in your online cart before purchasing it. Eliminates late night clicking. You realize things are out of control when the packages arrive and you have no idea what’s inside.

We were also much more conscious about food shopping. We used to go to Sainsbury’s every day and buy ingredients for that night’s dinner. But you never go out with only what you need. I put the Ottolenghi cookbook aside and pulled out an old copy of Save With Jamie – something I bought years ago when we were living on a par with our lives – and started shopping just for the meals I cook. Jamie’s concept is great: you cook a big meal and live off it for a few days.

I’ll roast on Sunday and turn the leftovers into stews, soups, bubbles and squeaks, all healthy and nutritious. Under the new regime, we stopped having a fridge full of uneaten food scraps that would fester for a week before heading to the bin.

After I also banned buying food in Waitrose and Marks & Spencer, our food bill went from £1,000 a month to £600. Going into these stores for a product quickly turns into very attractive, expensive products that you don’t need. I now buy wine on offer, I’ve stopped drinking it on weekdays, and on weekends I limit myself to two glasses a night by pouring the wine into a decanter in advance.

I had a monthly beauty subscription for £25 and was saved. All these retinol creams kept coming and I ended up with plenty of them. A subscription to luxury Purdy and Fig cleaning products is also valid, saving a further £12 a month.

I canceled a £30 a month gym membership that no one remembered setting up, let alone using. I called Sky and canceled our TV package. They called me back the very next day and offered me a much better deal, saving me another £35 a month. You just need to be prepared to go through the painful process of canceling.

I was going to the hairdresser every six weeks for a cut and colour, costing £120. Now I’m leaving it for 12 weeks until I’m completely helpless and my roots are so bad they look like badgers. But, hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Making these pretty extreme savings gave us a financial reset, and I encourage everyone to do this once a year to build financial resilience. Eliminating unnecessary expenses is like organizing a room; You feel very calm afterwards. Now that we’ve done the hard work to get all this in place, I’m not sure we’ll ever go back to our old bad habits.

A.Jade Beer was told

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