Cost of living: Teacher turns Insta star making five meals for £25

Four years ago Ashleigh Mogford was on maternity leave and, in her own words, totally skint.

Today she is an influencer with close to 500,000 followers on Instagram, a deal with a major supermarket and a glossy cookbook.

"Even now I still get this feeling of 'they've got the wrong person'… I feel like someone's going to knock on my door and say 'we were just joking'," said the 31-year-old from south Wales.

Ashleigh is best known for her videos showing how to make five family meals for £25, sharing shopping lists, recipes and glimpses into her family life in Wenvoe, Vale of Glamorgan.

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Ashleigh, mum to a 16-month-old and four-year-old, said the cost of living crisis meant families were looking for tips on cutting costs.

"People really need to save money at the moment, they're relying on me," she said.

She first started posting as @cardiff.mum while on maternity leave from her teaching job four years ago, at first sharing ideas for affordable family days out.

"I was on statutory maternity so I was skint, really skint, so I started learning how to budget, how I could pull back on bills," she said.

She found her food bills an obvious place where she could make cuts.

Through careful planning and sharing ingredients across meals, she realised she could make five family meals for £25 and started sharing her meal planning on Instagram.

"It just blew up, it went crazy because that's what mums want," she said.

"Everyone wants to save money, everyone spends too much on food shopping and wastes too much food, no-one knows what to cook… everyone makes the same old spag bol, sausage and mash pie every week."

Ashleigh has had no training in cookery but credits her obvious flair in the kitchen to watching her mum, her travels abroad and spending several years working front of house at TGI Fridays in Cardiff.

Fairly quickly her food videos started attracting up to four million views.

It was a far cry from her work as a secondary school geography teacher and later, a supply teacher.

"I always knew [teaching] wasn't what I wanted to do," she said.

"Juggling the kids was impossible... the [school] kids were really badly behaved and it used to affect me a lot… the kids would speak to me like rubbish, one time I even got egged.

"I would come home and think 'what am I doing? That isn't for me'."

As Ashleigh's online popularity grew and the cost of living crisis deepened, newspapers started taking interest in her and her money-saving recipes.

Before long Aldi came knocking and offered her a 12-month partnership to do one video a month using their ingredients.

"That's when I thought 'there's no point in me going back to work'," she said.

"The money they were offering me was similar to what I was getting in teaching so I'm not going to go and kill myself in a job that I hate when I could be home with the kids and doing what I love."

She quickly realised her videos were having a positive impact on her followers.

"People were saying I'd saved their relationships, people were saying they were depressed because they didn't know how they were going to pay their bills and that I'd given them so much hope," she said.

Then came the book deal with Penguin Michael Joseph, which she describes as her biggest work achievement to date.

When she announced it to her followers in the summer, pre-orders saw it go to number one for all books on Amazon. It was published on Thursday.

"I lost a lot of sleep over that," said Ashleigh.

Ashleigh has had to become accustomed to being recognised when she's out and about and people asking for selfies.

She has also been enjoying PR trips, where she gets to take her family on free holidays in exchange for online content.

But her rising success also had a downside - trolls, something she struggles to deal with.

"When people started to see me getting these opportunities I did start to get backlash a lot and that's been hard because I'm really sensitive and I take things personally," she said.

"I don't like feeling as though I'm upsetting people and even though these people are being mean and unreasonable and are just attacking me, I feel hurt that I've done something to hurt their feelings for them to attack me like this."

Initially the abuse caused her to withdraw from her page, but she said she was working on "getting a bit of a backbone".

Opening up about the trolling to her followers has also helped, receiving "a massive internet hug - they just raise me back up".

Life has changed drastically for Ashleigh but she still finds time each Sunday to plan her meals for the following week and write her shopping list in time to head to the supermarket on Monday.

"When you've learnt the tool of budgeting you won't do anything else… and I love it," she said.

• 1) Share ingredients across meals and never buy one ingredient for just one meal. If Ashleigh buys, for instance, a tub of cream cheese, a bag of spinach or a bunch of spring onions, it typically goes into three meals
• 2) Set a budget and be really strict at sticking to it.
• 3) Keep a list of budget meals that you like to make as this makes planning your meals and shopping easier.