Dad who earns $81K-a-year says he struggles to put food on the table

A dad who earns $81,000 per annum claims he's struggling to put food on the table amid the ongoing cost of living crisis.

Don Parkes is among the top ten percent earners in Australia, though he struggles to make ends meet every single month.

The father-of-eight earns his buck by working as a factory manager in a job that he hoped would make him financially comfortable.

However, Don finds he has to cut costs wherever he can to put food on the table for his family.

But despite making many cut backs over the past few years, the family have been stretched to the limit amidst the ongoing cost of living crisis in Australia.

Don and his wife Kirsty have since been forced to dip into their savings to help pays expenses, while also asking their two teenage sons, Corey, 17, and Josh, 19, to help contribute towards rent and food costs.

Nine

Speaking on Nine's A Current Affair, Don said: "It's hard to imagine that $125,000 a year is a struggle, it doesn't make sense."

Kirsty went on to say that the family spends $780 on groceries every fortnight despite trying to make cutbacks in many areas, such as buying supermarkets own-brand foods.

Not only that, the family have put health on the back burner as they've stopped purchasing the likes of fresh fruit, vegetables and meat due to rising prices.

Instead, they have had to 'substitute the quality now for the quantity' with cheaper but less nutritious and healthy meals.

"We've had to substitute the quality now for the quantity because we have so many mouths to feed," Kirsty said.

"We can get a family pack from McDonalds... and that's a better price than trying to buy meat, buy the veggies, buy everything else and cook it at home."

Nine

"Health insurance is not something that's affordable, it's not something I could even budget into what we have," Kirsty added.

"We need to eat first, we need to clothe the children, we need to pay our bills so they're the kind of things that get left by the wayside that I would consider more of a luxury."

The Parkes family will actually receive about $522 USD a year more from PM Anthony Albanese's controversial changes to Stage Three tax cuts - though Kirsty reckons not much will change for her family without drastic measures.

Adding: "They need to find a way to actually kind of curb that or find some sort of ceiling where they go, ok, enough is enough - how do we do that?"