What am I doing wrong on this salary?!

[Llkkg]

I earn enough money, around 3100 after student loans. My mortgage is 950 and council tax 180. I have some credit card payments of around 120 but that’s it. I will need to get a car soon though as that’s around 350 a month.

For some reason I constantly run out of money and I don’t know where it goes. I don’t buy clothes often or anything like that. I know I have enough money and I feel shit that I can’t seem to keep on top of it. I don’t feel like I spend a lot but I’m obviously going wrong somewhere?!

You need to go through your bank account and work out where it has gone. Look through your direct debits first are there any for things you don’t need anymore.

Look at how much you have coming in each month and subtract from that your fixed costs like mortgage and bills, and hopefully savings. Divide what’s left by 4.5 and transfer that weekly into a Starling or Monzo account. Each week you have to live on what’s in your spending account. Once it’s gone it’s gone.

Both accounts have cool budgeting features that let you categorise your spending. It’s got my spending under control.

I'm a single parent and take home just over £1850 per month. I pay monthly for a decent 3 yr old car, council tax rent and bills and a bit of cc debt. After I've paid for everything inc food I have about £300 per month left some of which I put into separate pots for school uniform costs, Christmas, hair cuts etc. I get by

Th easiest way to track your spending…in addition to utility mortgage etc….is to use a credit card for everything….shopping, food, take always, clothes, entertainment. At the end of the month you have a complete record of your spending

Barclays app has a bit called Spending
It shows what you have spent and where you have spent it and how much

When I retired I reviewed my standing orders and managed to cut them from £600 to just over £300, I was shocked at what was needlessly going out each month, start there and see what you can cut

Running a home alone is very expensive. I budget everything.

If you tot up everything you've spent this month you will be able to see where it goes.

Easy. It sounds like you're frittering your money away on crap you can't afford, you know this, but you don't want to see the extent to which you've thrown away money.

I know it's hard, I know you don't want to, but you are going to have to take your head out of the sand and go through all of your bank account statements for the last few months minimum, and pull together a spreadsheet of where the money goes.

Look, maybe you've dumped £500 on Pret in the last month, but if you confirm that, you're less likely to do that next month. Until you look at your costs and you analyse them, it's not going to get any better.

If you really can't bear to do this, enlist your best friend to help. I'd do this for a mate, even if they were earning significantly more or significantly less than me.

Religiously go through all your bank statements and mark out what you’re spending and where. It’s easy to just fritter away your salary if you’re taking out 20 a day and spending at the shop or lunch or drinks. It took me being made redundant and on UC so absolutely NO money at all to realise quite how much I was wasting. Now o have a separate bank account where my bills are paid from. Then I’ve set up pots for each week. I can’t borrow from any other pot only that weeks’. Finally, for the first Time in my life I have savings and an emergency fund. The relief is incredible. I could cry when I think about the very very high salaries I’ve earned over my working life and yet I was living from pay check to pay check and god forbid an unpaid bank holiday or a late salary cheque. You can get yourself sorted and I’m a prime example of this. Check out some of the female financial accounts on Instagram, they have sound advice and are not judgemental. Good luck!

The problem which everyone is missing is that it should be possible on this kind of salary to live a normal, happy life with treats, fun and some “unnecessary “ spending. We don’t live in North Korea.
We have a fucked up country in which all but the wealthiest are expected to count every penny and “get by”.

I don’t think the OP is coming back. This thread is extremely similar to another one I linked unthread and I just feel like sometimes “journos” want some easy material for cost of living type pieces they need to write.

She already said she doesn’t have a car at the moment.

Shop at Aldi and buy ready meals in place of a takeaway. You can lease a car for £200 a month or a bit more but it would have to be a small basic car. Definitely pay off your credit card as soon as you can, I use a credit card to buy everything but then I pay the total amount every month. It’s crazy to use them any other way.

Oh tell me about it. One word: food.

Only saw the severity of the issue when Mumsnet posts talked about how they spend £50 a week on feeding a family of 4 or something.. it was a huge wake up call.

I find the key to losing all my hard earned money and come up empty-handed at the end of the month is always prioritising quality over cost (bread, eggs all the way to laundry detergent etc.) and zero junk allowed. That could see a packet of biscuits cost you £4.50 from a nice brand with good quality ingredients, instead of £1 for jammy dodgers at Iceland. And a packet of biscuits goes fast at my house..

Also convenience eating/drinking. It's scary how quickly the little things add up. I felt the same as you - how do I have no money left to buy myself nice things or go somewhere nice, having barely done anything but survive this last month? I sat down and went through all my outgoings and it just rinses out on convenience snacks and meals, coffees, grabbing a bottle of water when out and about.

Basically for some of us (I'm not the only one), once we think we can afford the finer stuff we go for all the organic, eco-friendly, delicious, or exotic stuff that we know if better for our own health and for the environment, because we feel we can. Then once we realise we ended up poorer than we've ever been, we've adjusted to the high life and it take a ton of adjusting to reign it back in!

I need to start with cutting out the snacks - refusing to snack will massively reduce grabbing stuff on the go and wasting my daily nutritional intake on expensive treats.

Just saw this! Gosh I think you're right and I feel duped.. but on the other hand I think it's useful insights for all the mumsnetters anyway. I clicked myself because it's a real issue and would love tips and experiences from others to feel more supported in that area.

@minimemomi I know what you mean, it's like I know the nice food is nicer but is it really necessary in everything?! I saw a tip saying that you should try buying a level below in everything and seeing if you notice. If you do, go back. If you don't, go another level down. I've tried this and ended up with things like fancy butter for bread but not cakes, fancy pizza sauce but not tinned tomatoes, decent cheese for sandwiches but not pasta, etc.. It means you get the quality where you notice it but cut the cost overall.

It is in the end a case I suppose of preserving and training oneself to really alter one’s relationship with spending and saving (assuming there is the privilege of enough money in the first place).

we are one of those households where thrifty groceries and budget cooking and no spends have been perfected to a very fine degree to massively prioritise mortgage overpayments, pensions, saving and investing. Interestingly this doesn’t mean joyless life - building equity and saving for a future that never arrives. Instead we’ve figured out that actually it is entirely possible to enjoy life and social life without bleeding out money on things that can be checked.

it’s taken an entire re training via MSE and the Meaningful Money Podcast and a new rapport with the spending-saving spectrum

I 100% agree with this. It is so depressing how utterly joyless so many people’s lives sound on here (on supposedly decent salaries). Not all the blaming the people needing to scrimp and save on everything - it’s just shocking to me that this is accepted as normal in a supposedly wealthy country…

Whoops *not at all blaming

Honestly I feel the same way but I do take home a grand less than you,.. I check my bank account each month to assess and still - I just don’t get why I’m always struggling at the end of each month
I do have two children but I share those costs …you are not alone , you just can’t work out where it all goes lol