To be struggling on 3k per month?

You need to keep a spending diary so you can see where your money is going. So list everything you spend on a day by day basis and you may pick up where you are being frivolous,
That said your water bill is shockingly high - are you paying off a debt? If you are not on a meter then get one - you could cut costs there. Are you travelling for work because £70 per week for fuel is a lot too? You could cut costs on food shopping by menu planning and then shop accordingly - however if packed lunches for school are included then it's probably not too bad.
Make the effort to send the Sky equipment back - that's just money down the drain if you don't even use it!

On sky, make that a priority if you don’t use it!!

People on not the same money will always tell you you should be loaded but they’ll have forgotten what things were like with kids and also will have different priorities to you. We once sat down with mil for her to help with our expenses as we were close to rock bottom (barely paying rent, had gone to charities for help etc). Up until that point she had been saying we were obviously buying extras and not thinking about them. When she saw the coat of our rent and childcare as nc how much we were paying in loans I could SEE her still trying to pick out what was going wrong until she finally said sometimes you just had to keep on keeping on.

A few weeks later she was back telling us if her and fil had had the money we had life would have been different!!

Also remember the answers here will be how to help you and will be made up of people managing on less. Sit down, notepad and paper and phone and see what you can do, but actually do it!!

Just reminding people that her outgoings are not £1,500 - some of those items are weekly. It’s £2,266.

Cancelling Sky is a nightmare. Who has the box - does your ex? Whose name is it in? Has he a new contract?

You need to spend time arguing with them and expect them to fight dirty. Look at threads on here and on Reddit for tips. If your ex has a new Sky contract, so much the better. If it’s in his name, don’t mention your marriage. He lived here but moved out. Your contract is with him. This is his new address. If he has the box you need to return it. You are spending £840 / year you don’t need to. There’s your Christmas present budget right there.

Food-wise, some Mumsnetters do incredibly well with their food shop but I don’t think yours is that far out of whack if you have two children. Can you shop at Aldi / Lidl? That might save you some money per week.

How many phones is that £60 paying for? How old is your mobile? Have you in fact paid for your handset now and can move to a cheaper tariff?

A relatively affluent area in the North. I need to be here to be by my mum, keeping childcare low as she has my DC 2 days a week and when I am late back from work.

annoyingly if I had stayed living down south and bought a shared ownership property I’d be over £1100 a month better off as I’d get UC for nursery and the rental portion of the shared ownership. Make it make sense.

Honestly as someone who earns the same I would not have sky, an expensive phone, or a pet. I'd say they are luxuries for people who are well off.

Having said that, you still have major disposable income after all those costs so you must be spending somewhere?!

So there we go, you can’t manage your own money so it’s time to benefit bash. Why would having benefits make you better off when you’re issue is you are wasting money and you don’t even know what on?

Difficult to say until you tell us whether you've checked your outgoings for the last 2 months and located that £700...

I completely understand @Strictlyskint. I’m on more than you (£4300) but have a bigger mortgage (£1500) and childcare (£400) and I am really really struggling

Try voxxi for your phone. It’s £10 a month for basically unlimited calls and data (I’ve not gone over date so far at any rate!)

Ring up and cancel your Sky, they will try and renegotiate you a lower rate. If not, do the full cancellation and wait for the cancellation team to ring you with an offer. It’s a slight gamble but if it doesn’t work out you would likely get a better deal as a new customer anyway.

Does the £70 for Sky include broadband I note you don’t list that?
Can you phone sky and explain you’re struggling, can they offer a cheaper deal?
What is the fee? Would paying it but having no monthly bill mean you were better off after a few months?

I'm a lone parent, no maintenance 🙄, children with one in university and finding it really tough due to this. I have a good income but again, not entitled to anything.
I was finding it really tough.
What I did was I took two months bank statements and I write out everything...everything that I spent.
I then collated all that (food, eating out, diesel, parking etc) and asked chatgpt to give me a budget, which it did. I have all my bills accounted for, subscriptions, direct debits, kids' costs etc etc. It came up with a budget, with food, clothes, social, misc, medical etc
So i have a copy and I log each spend against the "budget". I can't overspend if I dont have it spare. It helps me keep my spending in check.
I'm now breaking even, but I have no capacity to save. Better than it was.
Ring Sky and cancel. Its the only way.

Have they got a paid off/ancient tiny mortgage/capped rent? It can be easy not to realise how rents have risen if they no longer have that expense at a current level.

£1500 is a lot to not know where it goes. You need to go through your bank statements and work it out. Yabu.

When is the contract up? You just don’t renew and send back the equipment then.

Yeah we get kibble, the pouches are usually not very good quality. The sachets are also substantially more expensive than tinned equivalent.

You answered your own question..you're frivolous.

Other people have suggested this but what I do is write down everything that goes out in terms of money and I mean everything.
All of your major bills are easy, they might even be directly taken out of your bank account so you know exactly how much those are,
But I'm talking about every single time your physical or digital wallet opens and I mean for a coffee, a treat, donation rounded up at the register for charity, a lotto ticket, anything.
That part will be hard to remember to write down because you sometimes forget, but write it on your hand or in your phone as soon as you pay something unusual.
And then write it on a big piece of paper when you get home maybe in the kitchen. By date. Just keep a running tally of everything that goes out.
Chances are you'll still forget something but at the end of the month, you can go through and you can find out where the money went.

No, you might have some subscriptions or other online leeches that you forgotten about, some of which may be completely legitimate like you might be paying for cloud storage photos or online antivirus protection, stuff that you've been doing for years and you forgotten about, you'll have to do a little more research to find those once a year recurring subscriptions that have flown your mind.
Additionally I believe that there are some online services/apps that you can utilize to help you find these subscriptions that you're paying for that you might have forgotten about.

Money that comes in is important, but money that goes out is equally important.
And it's really easy to know how much money comes in. Typically as you mentioned that is your monthly wages and your child support. There is no other money coming in.
But the money that goes out is fugitive, it goes out in big things it goes out in little things it flies out seasonally, that's what you got to try to figure out where it's leaking from.

And I can't tell from your posts if your parents are being a pain or if they are trying to show genuine concern. Perhaps a bit of both. Well I do believe that they are correct in saying with the amount of money that you make and the amount of people you're supporting you should be able to have some money left at the end of the month, don't consider yourself to be a financial failure just yet. You've just got to figure out where that extra money is going. You've already accounted for about half of your income and you can't figure out where the other half's going so that's what you got to figure out. But congratulations for having us be concerned, something that you're trying to fix, and also having no debt at the end of the month. Cuz that's great.

(Edited because I forgot to add, you already know that you're paying for sky service and you say you don't use it, but you're paying every month for the equipment which you haven't returned yet. Well that's already a pretty big red flag to me, there must be other things like this that you've just forgotten about or you think are too much trouble to go after, and they're bleeding your wallet.)

Why don’t you just send the equipment back to them? This doesn’t make sense

Tell them you're cancelling and ask them to send you something to return the equipment in. They can be quite persuasive trying to get you to stay but stay strong and think about how much you'll be saving!

How are you managing to feed 2 cats on £15 pm? A box of 40 sachets is normally upwards of £12, even 2 small cats should be sharing 5 sachets a day. Are you just giving them dry food?

If you don't know how are the rest of us supposed to.

Have you looked at Amazon, Uber, ATM withdrawals, takeaways, clubs, treats when the kids ask, clothes shopping on a weekend, drinks? The list of places that you can dribble your funds is never ending. Be honest with yourself!