I closed the 2025 tab on Sunday night at twenty to ten, with a cup of tea gone cold and Mabel asleep on the warm end of the laptop charger. It's the first time I've had a full year of the spreadsheet, the bills sheet and the receipt jar to look at together. This is what they said.
Groceries: £5,677
That's everything from the shop that goes in a cupboard, a fridge or under the sink: food, cleaning, toiletries. Takeaways, school dinners and clothes are counted elsewhere. It comes to about £108.90 a week against a target of £105, so I was a little over on average and never in a panic. The cheapest month was February at £421. The dearest was December at £598, with the Christmas food in it, followed by August at £503, when both children were at home for the school holidays and ate their way through the fridge. In January I put the target up to £115 a week, because £105 was starting to feel like a number from a different year.
Home-cooked tea, which is most of what we eat, ran at about £1.65 a portion, or £6.60 for the four of us.
The bills: what rose and what we cut
The January 2025 bills sheet had 14 direct debits and came to £1,481.58 a month. The January 2026 one has 12 lines and comes to £1,448.01. Two lines went because they were two things nobody was using: phone storage and a reading app, £8.48 a month between them. The mortgage didn't move. It's fixed at 1.89% until April 2027, and I think about April 2027 more than is good for me.
April's rises added about £33.66 a month: council tax, water, energy, phones, the TV Licence. Over nine months that's £302.94. What we changed:
- Broadband, from £61.50 to £28 a month: £301.50 over the nine months
- Car insurance, £612 quoted at renewal, £478 paid: £134
- Home insurance, £486 quoted at renewal, £321 paid: £165
- The two forgotten subscriptions: about £100 for the year
- Packed lunches against school dinners: £263.52
The first four come to about £700, which is more than twice what the April rises cost. I should be honest, though: those are savings against what the quotes said we'd pay, not money that turned up in the account. If I had done nothing, we'd have been £700 worse off, and that's all I can say for it.
Energy came to £1,878 in direct debits across the year: £151 a month to March, £163 from April to October and £142 since the fix started on 1 November. We used 2,980 kWh of electricity and 11,400 kWh of gas.
The surprise
The bit I hadn't expected was takeaways and eating out. I'd always thought of the chippy tea every other Friday and the odd pizza as pocket change. Added up, they come to about £55 a month, which is £660 for the year. That's £11 short of what Christmas cost, and £16 more than all of the children's clothes put together at £644.
I should say what I'm not saying. I don't think £660 is too much, and nobody in this house is going to give up the chippy. Fakeaway Fridays and a fish and chip tea are the best part of the week for four people who've been up since six. The surprise wasn't that the money went, it was that I'd never looked.
Alongside that, Vinted brought in £186.40 against £142.60 spent, so we were £43.80 up on kids' clothes in a year. I'll write that one up properly later this month.
What I'm doing with it
Not very much, to be honest. The 2026 tab has a line for takeaways now, where before it hid in "other". The grocery target is £115. I'll check the fix in the summer and the car insurance in March, and I've put 14 August in the diary for the home insurance, since it's the one that bit hardest. The Mabel pot got its £10 a month, £120 for the year, and wasn't touched, which is the cat's one contribution to household finances. The rest of the year is the same family doing the same sums, a bit older.
