Ok, ok, deliberately provocative title for a basic WWYD. And I'm asking for financial advice in AIBU, so I am prepared for Opinions, capital letters.
We've happily lived within our income for years and years, but borrowed against the mortgage to reno our kitchen, so we have a debt to repay, albeit as slowly as we like.
There aren't a lot of areas we can cut back on. I could squeeze every area slightly but it would be a lot of effort for really not much money. I just deleted a long explanation of how cheaply we live because it was dull, but neither of us has expensive hobbies, buys CDs or computer games or expensive clothes, our social life is parks/picnics/free toddler activities/dinners with friends, and we're both DIYers. This is all just because we are boring sods naturally frugal; we lived like this even when we both worked fulltime.
There are two areas where there is some real fat to cut. One is food, and the other is my hair. If we cut one or the other, we'd add enough to what we currently save in order to pay down the debt fast enough.
Food: we cook from scratch so the budget isn't taken up with processed meals, but I spend around $200 (150quid) a week for two adults and a toddler. Our meals are meat or seafood heavy, which is made worse because I buy from a local butcher who sells free-range, ethical, great quality meat which is probably 150% of the price of other butchers. We tend to have good cheese, pate and posh crackers in the house, mineral water, wine, etc. My two year old is familiar with smoked salmon, olives and Brie, which is ridiculous because she'd be just as happy with cheddar and pickles but she eats what we do, and this is how we eat. We don't have junk food or snacks, but everything we do have is unncessarily good quality. I'm pretty sure I can cut this by a third without compromising on fresh ingredients and well cooked meals, it would just mean going to a cheaper butcher, making a couple of vegetarian meals a week, buying cheaper cuts.
Hair: I spend a fortune, frankly. It's long, and only gets cut every 3 months, but I go to an expensive hairdresser. The real expensive is the colour; it's coloured and streaked, and that happens every six weeks. I spend about 100 quid a month on it, all up. If I coloured it at home and found a cheaper cutter, it would go down to about 20 quid a month since it's only cut every three.
Here is the justification part: I couldn't do anything like the streaking at home. I'm mousy with a lot of premature grey, so the blonde streaks help cover the roots much better than any solid colour ever has. The cut is the first cut I have ever been really happy with, it's very low maintenance and looks classy but funky, and professional enough for my job. I've never found a cheaper hairdresser that can do as good a job, maybe I'm unlucky? I'm not particularly slim and not particularly pretty, but the one thing I do have, now, is great hair. It makes me feel good.
I prefer to cut down the food budget, but AIBU?