Hi Milliemoo,
You might be hard pushed to spend ?50, but convert that to dollars and you're already spending around $130 a week.

When you consider that over here, simple things like a box of cereal is about $6 and 2 pints of milk is around $3, you've spent nearly $10 on breakfast!

Some meat is quite well priced so if you have steak and chips for lunch (for 2 people), you'd get away with spending $6/$7 on steak and about $2 for a bag of spuds, so nearly another $10 for lunch (albeit steak is not your every day kind of lunch!)

A bottle of shampoo will set you back $5/$6 depending on the brand.

When you have kids, things like a bag of sweets will cost you $3.

It's like I said in another post, life here does feel expensive by comparison. I was listening to the radio today, and they were discussing the cost of living. According to what they said, if you want anywhere near a 'comfortable' life, you need to be earning over the $40,000 mark a year. Thats fairly easily acheivable for a family income, especially if you are working in skilled fields (which all of you will/should be!).