to wonder how other people can always seem to manage much better than we do on their income

[slipperandpjsmum]

My dh and I have a reasonable amount of money coming into our family but I am forever reaching my over draft limit at the end of the month. This year we have not been able to afford to go on holiday. We live in a very modest house

I have just come back from my friends house. She is putting her house on the market and they are moving into something much larger. Other friends are going on long haul holidays. I know they earn less than I do I just can't work out what I am doing wrong.

I did that write down everything I was spending thing and we have cut out anything we can do without.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions as to where I am going wrong!!??

It feels very frustrating working full time but feeling like we have no money left for some nice things aibu to expect to be able to??

I always wonder the same! It is usually credit or parental handouts, in which case, nothing to be learnt. But some people are good at buying bargains, which makes a difference with larger items like furniture, or shopping around for holidays, cars etc. Or they are very good at DIY and decorating and never have to pay anyone to come out. I think all you can do is list your expenses and either post it on here or discuss with a friend who you know to be good with money (rather than just rich!) and see if you can make any changes. Before you do, it's worth prioritising. There's no point in people cutting into your social life outgoings if that's important to you.

Also, don't assume you necessarily know your friends' incomes unless they have actually told you. It might be a lot higher than you think - in some industries it's just normal to get continual promotions and pay rises (not mine, unfortunately!).

Looking at it from the opposite perspective, I know several people on good incomes who complain about lack of money despite having a tiny mortgage and no kids, and you will usually find everyone has an achilles heel! (In my friends' case, they eat out 2-3 times a week which they absolutely love!) So don't beat yourself up too much - you are probably very normal!

I do have one motto - save more than you can ever afford.

One the first of each month blow a large chunk of your wages on savings and live the rest of the month hand to mouth It is surprising what you can learn to live on if it just isn't there in the bank - play the game

It isn't always on credit cards/loans nor inheritance. Some people manage better, don't buy stuff they dont need or save up. Just because you see them go on holiday they could have saved for 6 months before booking.

We earn a good wage, have no debts bar the mortgage, nice detached house, 2 nice cars and 2 long haul holidays a year but we haven't had children yet because we wanted to be able to be financially secure before we did, it's choices people make not always handouts etc.

There are lots of factors.

A good example, my cousin and her husband and three kids live on his part time teachers salary and really struggle. Turns out they spend over £120 a week on food!

There are six of us, I meal plan and we dont have to watch the pennies but I refuse to spend more than £100 a week, and never do. That frees up cash to spend on other more exciting things!

Mortgage is bound to be the biggest difference. If we had bought this house 2 years sooner our mortgage would be about a third less which would pay for two really lovely holidays every year.

The point about not noticing what people don't buy is such a good one. We don't spend much on clothes, nor do we constantly update and replace items and decor in our house. We like to drink nice wine and have two very nice cars. SIL is always at my car, but she spends hundreds every month on masses of clothes and having her hair done which I don't.

I do find some people I know seem to have much more comfortable lifestyles than me on what I assume to be a similar income. However, I do also know people who earn about what I do, yet are much worse off/always broke. Family help may be part of it, but I think the way you spend money is really important.

For example, we hardly ever have takeaways, and rarely eat out. I never buy newspapers (make do with the free Metro on the train!) or magazines. I don't buy coffees at work, and if I do buy lunch (maybe once every week/fortnight) it will be £2-3 at most. I don't like drinking at home (I will if friends are round but not on my own) so that saves on wine. I don't drive so no car costs. Doesn't apply so much now my DC are older, but I always used to take drinks/snacks with us whenever we went out for the day etc so we didn't have to buy food out.

And I am very tight careful - I walk rather than taking the bus where I can, I spend ages browsing offers in the supermarket and for stuff online, I even cut and colour my own hair :)

I'm not as good as I could be I know, theres loads of ways I waste money and the people on MSE would put me to shame! But by doing the above, I cope with a pretty large mortgage and managed to pay for our hols to Spain last month (again though that was done on the cheap - total bill just under £1000. I do know for lots of people thats a huge amount of money, but that was about the max I could afford, so it was a challenge to get the most I could for the money - which included things like not paying for airport transfers, as it was cheaper to get a taxi on arrival, paying for 2 bags luggage allowance between 3 of us, which was plenty...and so on.

It's also about priorities. I see people spending literally hundreds of pounds a month on clothes and handbags and yet live in a fairly modest house.
I'd rather the bigger and better house, thanks!

I find this fascination with how others afford things a bit odd tbh. Surely you should focus on what you want and how you can achieve your objective. Everyone has different circumstances and start points. As Tsil says it's not always debt/inheritance. I don't discuss my income, savings/investments, with anyone (bar my accountant) and with one exception, my friends don't discuss theirs with me. We have different priorities, and make different choices. My thing is holidays, shoes and nice food/drink. My friend otoh likes cars and stuff for the house. So OP yanbu to ask where you are 'going wrong', but yabu to use your friend as a measure of your success or perceived lack of it.

We live well on a low income and seem to do more than others on more money - but its where you make the cutbacks. As someone further up said - you only notice where they spend, not where they don't.

For me the 2 biggest things is that we don't have a car (we moved somewhere we could walk most places) and we share our (rented) house with a friend so we share bills.

We have also never really spent much money on furniture - all either stuff thats been given away (even from front gardens), second hand/charity shops (we paid just over £100 for our 2 sofas together) and at a push when all else fails - Ikea (mostly bargin basement), or anything for our home unless absolutely neccessary and even then we tend to put it off for months.

Neither me nor dh have any particular interest in clothes or shoes - we shop in asda/primark/shoezone etc and only when the stuff we have got wears out.

We don't spend money on mobile phones - we go for cheapest ones available (mine was £3.95 new) and only top them up every few months. Our phones are both dodgy and not properly working and have been for a while but it will probably be another couple of months before we actually get round to getting them.

However there are plenty of ways in which we do spend a lot. We buy ready made formula (individual cartons) rather than powder. Dh drinks bottled ales (though breaks this up by also drinking much cheaper cider). We eat meat once a day at least. I buy lunch when I'm at work. We usually eat out at least twice a week (though this tends to be macdonalds/wetherspoons and for special occassions Nandos). We never take food with us when we go anywhere - always buy there. When on holiday when tend to eat out all the time as well.

There are plenty of other things that we save/splurge on.

I also save as much as I can each month to cover things such as holidays/birthdays/christmas plus e.g. spending money for holidays and summer activities for ds.

I think it's interesting though, really is.

A woman on another forum was always posting about eyewateringly expensive clothes she was buying just about every week.
Then she was moving house and posted about that and a link etc. Turns out the house was very modest indeed and there she was with Mulberry handbags , designer clothes worth thousands and a pretty cheap house.

Like I say, we are all different but you never can tell. Another woman on a forum spent literally thousands on hand bags, top end , hundreds of pounds a bag handbags. Thousands and thousands of pounds worth. She would post regular pics of them but the thing I noticed about her photos wasn't the £500 bag but the shabby, dated sofa behind it and the tatty carpet under it. I think some folk have extremely odd priorities.

I'd say it's a combination of...
-making sure you see only the good stuff
-lieing a bit to inflate how much they spend / income
-mortgages
-credit cards
-child care.

Don't worry about it. As my mother would say, it's vulgar to worry about money.

(I just wish she'd pass on some of hers, iyswim!!!)

Regarding clothes and handbags. This is something you can see. But many women spend lots more on their skin, hair removal etc and you dont know that unless you ask and they tell you the truth .
The heating is another thing you cannot guess. Some people have it on all day, others prefer to freeze and save for holidays.

Regarding the income you never know. Some people might do an extra little job in the evenings i.e. typing and dont broadcasting it.

But general speaking apart from the housing and childcare the 'small' things add up. I once started a thread asking how much people spend on hair and beauty/clothes and the average was 2-3 K a year! on the take aways/eating out thread the average i think is 1,5-2 K. Children activities can also be quite a lot. Amazon, presents, wine. You just need to write everything down.

CHOOGIRL, i agree!

You have to be very cautious when assuming that others are managing better than you on a similar income.

Someone I know was in bits when she and her OH recently split up, because they needed to sell the house but had absolutely no equity in it.

That might not be unusual these days but given that they bought the house 12 years ago and by my reckoning it's worth £180k more than they bought it for, it doesn't take a genius to work out how they were living a very lavish lifestyle on modest salaries.

Despite the fact that OH and I both earn good salaries and bonuses and our UK mortgage is tiny, we never have take-aways, don't eat out often and never 'shop for fun'. We rarely drink at home, don't buy magazines and don't buy take-away coffees. We do have Sky TV, but only a basic package rather than sports and movies etc, which we wouldn't use very much.

The reason I quote those particular things is that I have friends who do them all and think nothing of it, which is fine (obviously!), but the fact that they spend £100+ per week on them seems to be missed somehow. That £5k per year is as much as the mortgage on our second home, but the very fact we have it makes some people assume we're fabulously wealthy.

Other people's incomes/outgoings is a lot 'smoke and mirrors', in my opinion.

People have very different priorities. I've met people to whom it was important to buy designer clothes but were content to live in less salubrious areas of town. But then, it's easier to spend a few hundred/a few thousand on clothes than it is to spend hundreds of thousands on a bigger house/'better' location so it's a bit snotty to deride that choice! We live modestly relative to our income - partly due to the fact that we are anticipating making our 'forever house' purchase should we actually find it in the near future. I like decent holidays but I would still look for a 'bargain' - e.g go to Sardinia in June rather than Aug to save on cost/avoid crowds. Most recent example - indulged in a last minute Disney short break only due to the fact it was a 40% discount flash sale (wouldn't normally choose this but the children would love it even if we are gritting our teeth.) We have never had Sky - just Freeview and a Hard Disc Drive which is more than sufficent for our needs. I'm probably a little sad but I tend to wait for the sales or for a promotional sale weekend to buy the 'labels' e.g I waited for the Selfridges pre Christmas discount weekends to buy a Mulberry bag. Yes, I could afford it full price but it goes against the grain (I'm too much my father's daughter and he haggles for everything, the self made businessman that he is).

We're in the same boat. I'm a SAHM and DH is on about 40k... we are always skint two weeks after pay day... I think our problem is that once he gets paid, we get all the things that we've needed for the last week or two and we feel 'rich' so we also treat ourselves to a few little bits (literally a couple of books from the charity shop, or some nice ham or something) and it all adds up. I think our main outgoings are bills and food. The price of food is just ridiculous at the moment. I should really meal-plan but even the thought of it makes me want to die of boredom (hate cooking as well!). We have 3 kids and all their clothes (and ours) are either second-hand or bought in the sale/supermarket, or presents. We have the occasional take-away (1 a month, max), hardly ever eat out, and didn't have a holiday this year. Usually we'd try to rent a cottage for a week, but this year needed some work done on the house that couldn't be put off any longer, so that went down the drain. We're having friends to stay for a few weekends instead, and will be doing some day trips, plus a few days camping later in the school hols.

My friends all seem to have more money than us. They run two cars, go on holiday 2 or 3 times a year (within UK usually, but still), think nothing of paying for school dinners through the whole year (£10 per week per child), never buy anything second-hand, get work done on their houses without having to save up... actually it's really depressing when I think about it!!!

I think we need to look at our outgoings again and see what we can save on. We switched our home insurance 3 mths ago, and supposedly saved £120 but haven't noticed it yet!!!

When we first took our mortgage out, the payments seemed horrific, and we made a lot of sacrifices in order to be overdraft free. No holidays/takeaways/car/nights out.

Fast forward 20 years, and theres a only a little bit left on the mortgage. What got me through was knowing I would be in this position one day. I am truly grateful that we were able to take out a mortgage. I know people who will never be able to afford a mortgage, and will pay rent for the rest of their lives, when we will be mortgage free. Added to which, we will be able to leave something when we go, or realise extra money through equity release to cushion old age.

Yes, there are people who apparently find it easier than ourselves. There are many more in a worse position. I'm counting my blessings as to where I am, not yearning to be somewhere I'm not.

The biggest outgoing in our house, after the mortgage, is childcare. My DD's nursery costs £73 a day, so even though both DH and I earn in the top 10% of earners, once I return to work after DC2 (assuming they both go to the same nursery that DD is at now), there'll be no difference to our net income than there would be if DH was working and I was a SAHM. We will be considerably poorer than similar friends who only have one child or who get free childcare from family members, despite our incomes being higher or similar.

And scrimping £20 here and there on the supermarket shop or a cheaper electricity supplier isn't going to touch the sides tbh.

At least the cost is relatively short term - I know that we'll continue to pay for childcare for at least a decade, but we'll start to get vouchers, and the fees go down when they're three and the costs should reduce a bit once they're at school.

But it is a bit frightening to contemplate right now......

I'm another one who thinks its about priorities too. We chose to have a full repayment mortgage so that it is paid off when we get older, this together with high childcare costs ( my choice to go back to work) means that we can't afford expensive holidays or new cars but we are happy with that decision for now. Once both our children are at school we will be considerably better off and have discussed moving house to something larger but I will not put myself in ridiculous debt for the sake of it.

People tend to notice what others spend, but not what they don't spend, and interpret spending through their own personal view of what is "legitimate spending".

For example, a woman who spends £20 a month on computer games would be viewed by many as far more of a spendthrift than a man who spent £45 on books each month.

Here's a more personal example: my SIL and BIL have higher incomes than us, but regard the contents of my shopping basket with well-disguised horror. They're far too nice to say anything about it, except when absolutely driven to it (?£2.50 for a block of cheese! That's loads!"), but horried they are.

That's because they spend their money differently. For example, at the time I bought the over-priced cheese, they were spending a lot on holidays. Which is not so surprising, as they have difficult jobs that are heavy on hours, and responsibility. They needed the holidays!

We never holiday abroad, but we buy over-priced cheese instead. [Grin]

That's so funny. I totally agree it's about priorities and so on, choosing what's important to you, and what isnt.

I couldnt care less about buying new clothes and shoes for example but people I work with buy new things every week, not to mention handbags (I have one ).

However I do spend more on skincare (Clarins) and it's important to me to have a good holiday each year. I do this by buying flights as soon as they come out and then shopping around to find a place to rent with pool. This way we can self cater and eat good food but not spend money on going out or money on hotel-priced drinks etc.

We eat out maybe once a quarter. We never have take aways. We do eat out occasionally on holiday.

We do have a lovely house though and a big mortgage (£1500 per month), but we like to spend time in our lovely house and dont feel the need to go out much (god, that sounds sad but I hope you see what I mean).

We never buy magazines or coffees out. We only go to a shopping centre if there's something we NEED - never just go and browse. I bring packed lunch to work every day. We grow a lot of our own veg. I shop in Lidl or Asda and every time I shop in Lidl I grin to myself about how much money i am saving over Waitrose! My sister in law ONLY shops in Waitrose and was horrified to realise she was eating some smoked salmon from Lidl the other day .
I do actually have a relatively high income but of course you never know how long you're going to be in any job under the current climate. We have no debt or loans (other than mortgage). We do use our credit card (to get BA miles) but clear it in full every month.

Are you me ladydeedy?

I'll bet it is mortgage!

We were quids in until we moved house last year and suddenly thing we took for granted are out of reach. But I'm still delighted we moved.

maybe I am, Wallissimpson! I have apparently been a few people on here this week! . What else do you do, that I might do?