to say it's a struggle for a family of five to live on under a thousand pounds a month?

[yosammitysam]

Me and my husband keep rowing (at this stage only in an ongoing bickering way) about our monthly budget. Basically we have 250quid a week which is supposed to cover food, toiletries, going out (us and the kids), petrol, birthday presents, anything the kids need for school etc etc. I just seem to really struggle with that amount. We spend a minimum of a hundred on a weekly shop (then top this up). My eldest ds is ten and eats like a horse and youngest is only two and still in (bloody dear- thanks to his ecezma) nappies. It doesn't have to cover bills (or one off yearly expenses like holidays, car MOT etc) and we do have seperate money for clothes and shoes, but it's not much so I end up buying smaller things out of my weekly budget.

He says it's ridiculous that we are overdrawn every month- he works full time I am SAHM- as he doesn't really spend much money. I don't FEEL like I spend much either, but all the little bits really add up. We are quite sociable but only really go out or have friends over about once a month and maybe I'll go out for a drink with friends every couple of weeks (if that). It's just that all ther little things really add up- day trips out (esp in school hols), swimming, coffees here and there, a new book for each child etc etc

It's just soooo frustrating, I feel I have to justify myself all the time, but I think in the current climate, it just doesn't go that far. The point was brought home to me when my much younger half sister told me she earns eight hundred pounds a month after giving my parents rent- and she has ALL that to spend on herself !!! My husband just doesn't seem to get it at all. I don't know if he thinks I'm stashing designer shoes and handbags in the garage!

But am I being unreasonable?? I admit I am a bit rubbish at budgeting etc. I generally do a weekly shop then top it up through the week and I think that all adds up. What does everyone else live on?!?

Oh god, sorry so long and the bloody pound sign on the keyboard has broken so have to type out all the numbers! It's just that I just got our bank statement and it's got me really, really down. I know we could have it a lot worse, but I do find it frustarting.

YABU. You need to have a much better grip on what you are spending before you can have a proper discussion with your DH about a budget.

I effectively run our household myself as my DP works in London during the week and I am up there 3 days. Currently I have £145 per week after bills. This is for all my personal spending, anything I do with DS, one day at nursery for DS, the groceries, anything DS needs and anything I want to spend on the house or garden. This is much less than I am used to having as we took the decision to tighten our belts in order to buy a house.

I have our grocery bill down to around £20 per week, with probably an extra £20 every 3-4 weeks to top up more expensive things. I did this by using a book called "Kitchen Revolution" or something like that - it gives menus and shows you how to use ingredients/leftovers efficiently. The meals are quite complicated and I have only used a few of them but the general principles are really useful. This feeds me and DS for the 2 days we are on our own, the whole family over the weekend and gives us stuff to take up for the Monday in London. I know we only have one child but some of the things we are doing could easily be adopted by a larger family.

I use cloth nappies - this is a massive, massive saving. I have had to buy disposables recently because he does one day at nursery down here and they won't accept cloth nappies. This has boosted my spend massively.

I don't go to the hairdressers - I just trim my hair myself. The thing with the hairdressers is that you feel great for about 48 hours and then you can't usually tell you have even been!

I grow my own herbs and veg. Things like rocket and spinach and herbs are really expensive to buy and easy to grow. Last year I never had to buy any salad or herbs at all.

I don't often buy new clothes - I occasionally put things away rather than getting rid of them - 9 times out of 10 I will come back to them in a year and think 'ooh, I had forgotten that top'. I also sew so sometimes update something by shortening a hem or similar.

I go to charity shops, car boot sales, NCT sales etc. You can make huge savings.

Every now and again I have a big clearout and put stuff on ebay - even a few pounds here and there adds up.

I try to avoid paying for parking. Parking in Bath is really expensive in the centre but there are no buses near us so I drive as close to the centre as I can get without the parking being metred and then walk from there.

Budgeting doesn't really come naturally to me but there are loads of ways of saving if you really sit down and think about it. One mindset change I have found helpful is to know exactly what my weekly budget is and anything "unnecessary" that I want to buy I do a quick mental calculation, dividing it by 4 and working out what damage it will do to my weekly budget for the rest of the month. It's amazing how much stuff suddenly becomes not needed!

There is a really good book by India Knight called "Thrift" which has loads of good ideas.

I agree with the OP that it can be hard to manage on £1000 a month for a family of five - for food, toiletries, going out etc. I have about that for my family of 6 (2 adults, 3 teens and an under 10) and I struggle too - and I am very frugal!
We never, ever eat out - have always taken lunches with us on day trips, only go to cinema on orange Wednesday etc and I cook everything from scratch, always bargain hunt etc. However, I do buy a lot of fresh vegetables and fruit the only way I could save is by feeding everyone cheap fatty food and crap. Teens eat A LOT. School requests also add up - for example this week - is Comic Relief, I have had to provide cakes and £1 to each child for Non uniform plus sponsorship money for various CR activities, £5 for a dance workshop and £50 for a one night field trip - a total of about £73 and most weeks there is some request often with short notice.
There is also a big variation in food prices across the country - I live in the SE but my sister lives up north and when I stayed with her I couldn't believe how much cheaper a lot of things were.

Send your husband to do the weekly shop - I did this one week, I took my Dp with me and he kept trying to put in extras that I disallowed - he was shocked when the bill came to £178 and that we would still need more milk and some bread during the week. He now totally understands.
I have managed to cut costs a bit this year by buying cheaper smartprice style stuff - tinned tomatoes, dishwasher tablets, cheese, filter coffee etc - I notice the difference sometimes and some foods I have tried have been poor, but a lot of it has been fine.

I think you need to split the £1000 into separate budgets. One for shopping, one for days out, school expenses, your cash, his cash, and petrol etc.

Things like the guitar lessons and school clubs, if they are to be paid once a term, you need to budget a monthly amount.

The pound shop sells 4 birthday cards for a £1.

As others have said, cut out the coffees. Use the library/charity shops for books.

The Old Style board on MSE is good for meal tips.

You're only going £50 overdrawn a month. That isn't much compared to your income and over all spending. It should be relatively easy to shave a little off a few areas of your spending and keep you running in the black.

"I was looking at how bedraggled the garden looks today and thinking I need to get some bedding plants (more money!) and it feels like everything mounts up."

You don't need to do that.

It's march, so all you need to be doing in the garden is tidying up weeds and cutting the grass (when the weather's dry!)
d that, and your borders will look soooo much better.

You could buy some seeds - vegetable seeds are more practical because you can eat the produce! (and they still look pretty!)
even here, you can save money - you should be making a compost heap with kitchen and household scraps (not meat leftovers) - you don't need a special compost bin, just choose a part of the garden, maybe against a wall, and cover your scraps with an old carpet or a bin bag.
Don't use this compost for about a year - you can add to it every day and turn it once a month or so.

For planting your seeds - if your gardenhas good soil, that should be fine for yuor seedlings.
Use an old egg box, put in the wet soil, one seed per hole, pop on the windowsill (in an old icecream tub bottom or similar) and water regularly once they've sprouted.
When they get to about 2 inches tall, or 4 leaves, trasnfer them into yoghurt post (or the cut-off bottom of a milk bottle), and keep watering them until the last frosts have passed - then plant them out into the garden.
If you don't want to wait till the end of the frosts (usually june in the south of england, and a bit later the further north you go), you can still plant them in the garden, but put plastic around them at night (old clear bags, pop bottles with the top cut off etc)

It's a good project for the kids to get involved in, too, so that's an "entertainment" sorted!

Thanks again everyone. Haggis, that sounds exactly like one of my weeks! Everything just adds up. We live in Kent, and I suppose generally prices are higher in the Southeast. I do buy value ranges and do big shops in Lidl etc but there are some things I find it hard to comprimise on. Like I won't by intensively farmed meat, I do get a lot of fresh fruit and veg and fresh fish. So I suppose I could make savings in some areas that I choose not too. And yes, Tortoise the extended family/friends thing is tough as I hate the thought of coming across as mean and also will always offer to help people out. Like this weekend a friend of mine who is going through a messy divorce (she's v depressed) needs to get somewhere and I have offered to drive her (it will be about half a tank of petrol so 35quid ish) and I guess we'll have lunch while we're out. Should I not offer things like that? I'm sure she'll give me petrol money but she is having such a hard time at the moment I wouldn't dream of asking her or not offering to take her.

And we've got two families coming over for lunch next week (one of whom have just moved to the area so it seemed a nice, sociable thing to do) but I will have to feed 6 adults and 7 kids and I'll want to offer them a glass of wine. This is the sort of thing the money goes on as well. I feel like I'd have to be a really different sort of person to not do things like this. I'm not saying I'll put on some lavish lunch or anything, but I just want to be generous and welcoming I suppose.

The problem is I feel like we should easily have enough money for that sort of thing as generally everyone on here thinks the money we have is plenty to live on. But when you add this to everything else it just doesn't go that far.

I'm definitely going to do internet shopping and I did briefly discuss with dh last night sorting the money into smaller budget sections (eg us both having our own 'personal spending money' seperate from the food, petrol etc money.) to make it more manageable.

Thanks for the gardening advice nickelbaby- sounds like a great project!

And haggis, yes my dh does the shopping occasionally and spends a fortune (on a load of crap usually!)But I think he only really 'gets' it when he actually does the shop himself. I think online is the way forward. I'm sure the fiver delivery will be made up by the amount I save.

Kungfupanda your twenty quid grocery bill is amazing!!!

I am thinking of growing a bit more myself- was thinking of starting small with sald/herbs in pots as we do buy a lot of salad stuff in the summer.

It's funny, I never thought this thread would receive so many replies! It is all really interesting and very helpful. I think in real life people don't like to talk about money (in actual figures) so its always difficult to know how everyone else manages. I've realised I'm really lucky and that I just need to pull my socks up!

with the families coming over - is there any way you can ask people to bring a dish?
make it like a fuddle?
mioght be a nice way to getting everyone to feel involved, and give them a chance to choose what they eat too! (and make it cheaper on you! )

Last week i spent £44 on groceries for 5 of us (6 if my bf is here), as that is all i had left after allocating money going out on direct debits, and petrol for the car

The week before it was £37

This week i am hoping i will have a bit more to spend, but wont know til tomorrow for sure, though even then it will only be about £60

I am used to budgeting though being a lone parent who is not able to work, and therefore mostly broke

Menu planning in advance helps me keep the cost down

I very rarely buy anything ready made, aside from the odd pizza to store in the freezer for emergencies

I would love to have £250 a week to spend on groceries

Buy 1 get 1 free, reduced decent meat (which is going out of date and can be frozen down as soon as you get home) eg, decent silverside joint usual price being £7-8 could be reduced to £5-6 as it'll be out of date in 2 days.

We don't do weekly menus either. We buy the same meats every week and have an adventure as to what meals we make out of them. Say eg, mince. We buy an 800g pack and cut it in half, bag it and freeze. One half will do spag bol for 4 of us with some left over. We then use up the leftovers next day for lunch by putting chillies in to make chilli beef to go on a baked spud and that's 5 meals from 1 portion of beef mince.

Dishes like stews can be batch cooked and portioned up as ready meals to be microwaved if in a hurry. There are loads of things to do to reduce costs, which will leave you with more to spend.

'noodle on £80 a week you buy all food and go ut drinking and buy clothes? I really am going wrong somewhere! If I did something every day with DS it would cost £3.50 each day just for the bus (unless we're talking free local walk obviously) so a weekly ticket would be £11 a week before anything else. I'm not having a dig - just in awe!'

I buy 2 litres of cider for £3 and half it with a friend. That is enough to get me a lot little drunk on the weekend. Then go pubs/clubs half a cider and black is only £1.20 in wetherspoons and if I am already drunk dont need much top ups. I eat a lot of pasta thats dirt cheap. Bought 2 strappy tops yesterday from New Look and they only cost £1.99 each. Then go out a lot every day as I am by the sea so buy chips down the seafront for lunches out. I walk everywhere but we are right next to sea, soft play, parks and just about everything possible.

Probably different for me as everyone here is pretty young and all the mums so everyone lives cheapily. It depends different expectations/ages groups of becoming a mum/areas make a massive difference imo.

YABU - sounds like more than enough to me for a family of five, we live on half that and manage.

Also, worth remembering that 1 billion people in the world live on less than £1 a day, so please consider your use of the word 'struggle' - when what you actually mean is that you have to forego things you like.

I have about £1000 a month too but it also has to include clothes, and I agree with OP that it is bloody difficult. I do all the thrifty things mentioned in other posts, but 250 a week is hard to stick to when, in our case, petrol costs us nearly £100 a week!! Food for 5 - 4 adults and 1 large 9 year old is another £100, at least. Then there is bus fares and lunches for DDs to get to school, assorted school costs for trips, fundraisers etc, and it doesn't stretch very far. i am sick of penny pinching.

'Like I won't by intensively farmed meat, I do get a lot of fresh fruit and veg and fresh fish.'

Thats what makes peoples food bills high I very rarely buy fresh veg, never buy fresh fish and now and again buy fresh fruit. When I buy meat I just get lean mince from Iceland as its only £2

notreallyno, you are right 'struggle' is probably not the right word as I don't know what it is to genuinely struggle to stay alive as so many people in the world have to. What I mean is, it sounds enough money to be able to be a bit relaxed about what you spend and not count every penny, but clearly it's not. I do try and do the frugal things too, but I think the difference is I don't keep track of everything and probably make a lot of decisions which are a false ecoomy. Like I'll go to Lidl for the weekly shop on a Sunday morning which will last the week then nip into Waitrose on a Friay night for some bits for the weekend and end up spending the same amount that I spent on the weekly shop!

I am aware that as the dc's get older, as you have found dementedma, cost will just go up so I need to sort this now. Obviously I will go back to work when ds3 starts school but I'll be looking for a job in the public sector and job opportunities aren't exactly plentiful at the moment.

i thought you meant including mortage/rent! was about to congratulate you on surviving at all. I think YABU, and i speak as someone who's only recently learned to budget at all.

I can recommend taking money out once a week to cover everything you need and then eeking it out. Feels so much better than going to the cashpoint or using your card every 5 minutes; plus, when you spend money, it really feels like you're spending money, so it's easier to spend less than you normally would.

There's this really naff sounding self help book called 'The Money Secret' which i only read because my mum borrowed it from my aunt. It's actually really practical and gives you a kick up the arse. Have a look on Amazon.

'Like I won't by intensively farmed meat, I do get a lot of fresh fruit and veg and fresh fish.'

Again, as with the gift giving and lunches out with friends, these things are wonderful if you can afford them. But a lot of people cannot.

So it might be "harsh" to not give a friend a birthday present, it might be distasteful to buy the smartprice mince instead of the well reared cow mince, you maybe "won't" buy other cheap cuts, but if you don't have the money, you don't have the money. The choice is simply taken away from you whether to have principles or not.

Put it this way - if you're ever in a dally about whether to choose smartprice mince or save up for next week and buy the Asda own brand stuff instead (going veggie for a few nights to offset), then I think you'd be struggling as some families are having to do in this economy.

(BTW that's a real example from 2 years ago. i remember being in the middle of asda thinking "oh i can't afford mince with the £20 budget this week, i'll have to get it next week" and just feeling like screaming "what is the fucking point" - because we were both working at that stage. and it's a terribly sad state of affairs in terms of providing for your family when 2 able bodied people can't afford a spag bol with smartprice mince... imho, of course)

Having not read all the posts, I just want to fence sit, and say that I can see exactly how 1,000 might slip through your fingers. Taking kids to cinema including drinks and popcorn can be thirty quid easily, lots of people spend 100 on having their hair done, and hot chocolates and cakes at Starbucks for four is 15 quid plus. I don't have any travel costs apart from my annual travel card, but if you have to pay for bus tickets or petrol then it really stacks up. It's really easy to get into the habit of seeing this stuff as normal, when in fact if you stand back and look at it it's pretty shocking amounts of money.

But the good news is that since you're currently sloppy with budgetting then once you've tracked your spending for a couple of weeks it will be really obvious where you can cut out a hundred quid a month without making any actual sacrifices, I'm sure you won't have to stop offering lunch to friends, just have tea and toast at the local greasy spoon instead of frappawhatsit at Starbucks, and borrowing books from the library (starting with a few good vegetarian recipe books for some delicious cheap meals).

YANBU.

My Dad made a comment at the weekend, that when they were poor growing up in the 1950s, you could live so much cheaper.

No mobile, no laptop, no broadband, no TV, no Sky, no DVDs, no games console, no central heating, no restaurants. Weekly library van, chickens, veg garden, a pig to fatten. A special night out would be pictures and fish and chips in bag. Evenings of his mum darning socks and talking in kitchen.

He said they didnt have much money, but didnt need to spend much to live. We need such a lot these days.

I do buy value ranges and do big shops in Lidl etc but there are some things I find it hard to comprimise on. Like I won't by intensively farmed meat, I do get a lot of fresh fruit and veg and fresh fish.

Frozen veg is cheaper and supposedly contains more nutrients as it's frozen so soon after picking.

I don't see how you can give up fresh fruit but look for offers of BOGOF on punnets of grapes/cherries/strawberries.

For meat, if you feel strongly about it, don't compromise, just don't eat it as often. Snap it up if you see the free range in reduced section and put it in the freezer.

Just another one my dad mentioned, they would get through a bottle of sherry in a year, and this would be all the booze in the house. Dh and I get through a bottle a week, and this is us being good.

I'm rubbish with money, and dont have any tips.

oooh and a bottle of coca cola or lemonade, would be a once a week treat. I know we cant take strip our spending back to 1950s levels, but I am trying to make do and mend.

We're only 2 adults and one child (3) so hard to compare - but we have £80 for food and toiletries etc per week. I'm not including petrol as dh commutes for 2 hours a day so fuel is another matter for us and probably not comparable.

Try Sainsbury's recipes - £20 for a week of family meals. And don't buy new books etc unless there's money left at the end of the week.

We get £80 out on a Friday and that is to last a week. Sometimes we go over but at least we know where it's going and can keep track - putting it on a card is a nightmare as it's so easy to lose track.