To ask how much 'surplus' money your household has at the end of the month?

[SeiShann]

This is not a stealth boast. I was brought up in a poor family. Single parent mum on benefits in council flat. I started my own adult life in a similar fashion, ended up a single parent on benefits in a council house. Somehow I managed to sort myself out though, went to uni and became a nurse. Not great income but more than I ever thought possible. My fiancé also earns a decent wage although we're not 'loaded' by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway the point of my post ... I want to buy a car. It will cost £9k and I will pay for it by selling my current car (£2k) and saving up £3. The rest will be credit. Fiancé says we can't afford it and are not as 'flush' as I like to think. Just being nosy really and wondering if I'm missing something. So after all bills are paid and the groceries bought, what surplus do you have?
We spend £100 a week on groceries (2 adults, 2 teens). After that and all bills we have around £2000 surplus. I don't think that's bad myself but coming from a crappy background, am I missing something? We have no debts

If we had £9,000 to spend now and had to get a new car out of it, we'd buy a fairly ordinary 7 or 8 year old estate and a two week holiday in Europe for 4. Spending £9,000 on a car is madness, but I know lots of you won't agree.

None but that's because I YNAB to my hearts content. Every penny has a purpose.
Others may think I'm tight (my dh and I sound like we're more like your husbands thinking) but we have no mortgage or debt whatsoever and some fairly chunky savings and are planning to send our kids private without a struggle. We're fairly well paid but a big key to it was being v frugal in our early twenties and luck that we got together so young.

My point is that if you really do have 2k a month unaccounted for you could be in an amazing financial position in a few years.

Check out some of what Mr money mustache has to say and think about your financial goals.

Nope can't agree mintyy. I've never spent as little as £9k on a car!

Silvertap "I YNAB to my hearts content"

is that free, lol. Seriously is that = to living below your means? I did that in my 20s as well as ton of overtime. Was a good choice. When people say "it's easy to spend so much on bits and bobs" - not for me. £30 is a considered purchase in my world.

We have one car that was completely free and one that was £15,000!

YNAB: you need a budget. A fab piece of software.

If we had £9,000 to spend now and had to get a new car out of it, we'd buy a fairly ordinary 7 or 8 year old estate and a two week holiday in Europe for 4. Spending £9,000 on a car is madness, but I know lots of you won't agree.

What if you had £50K to spend? Might you buy a £9k car then? Would spending £9K on a car be madness in those circumstances.

But that's because you're completely loaded Apatite .

Of course I could prioritise other things over cars if I had £50k knocking around without a home.

Cars are a means to get you from a to b. I honestly couldn't care less about them. They need to be fairly reliable and reasonably comfortable afaic.

Hahaha mintyy touché

Hi do you mean you have 2k after pay day after bills for the rest of the month? Does your shopping come out of that, so the £100 a week?
Even if you had £1600 left for petrol, clothes, mot etc ie stuff not food, I'd say that's quite a bit to just spend as you please, I'd prob put £500/£600 away a month or get a loan where you can pay it off early perhaps so it's cleared quickly.
We seem to spend a fortune on food. It's really pricey I think at the moment, so £100 is pretty good going with teenagers!
Depends on what your dh wants to do with it, but it seems a pretty good bank Balance to me...

Have to rush off to work but Ill revisit this later.

I meant disposable income anyway, so on paper that's what we should have spare. After takeaways, drink, cinema, endless asda trips etc etc it's more like £400 - £500.

btw the car is a 2009 Audi A5

None but that's because I YNAB to my hearts content. Every penny has a purpose.

I am a YNAB devotee. It absolutely transformed my spending habits.

We don't have any debt whatsoever, and we have a very nice car.

Mintyy we have a 9 year old estate car and it's a f*cking PITA.

Something is breaking on it just about every fortnight. It's got about 140K on the clock now (all genuine as owned from new) and we're going to have to replace it soon.

DH drives 70 miles a day to and from work in 'easy' motorway miles. He bought the code reader and software so he can read all the fault codes himself and his friend is a VW mechanic who does lots of repairs for him at a reasonable rate. If we were having to take it to a commerical garage - even if not a VW one - every time it went wrong we'd need a second mortgage.

We need the car for DH's work and everything else (I don't drive). Trying to keep the old bird on the road much longer will be false economy.

Spending 4K on a car would just get us back into the position we are in now. DH's budget is about 10K and he's going off to the auctions with his mechanic friend in September when the fleet clearances start. I don't see how we're going to be able to get a big estate diesel that's going to last us for 5+ years for much less.

Right so you have 400-500 surplus. So on a 9k car you can expect to pay 180-240 ish a month depending on how much deposit you've got. I personally wouldn't by a 6 year old Audi A5 but that's up to you.

I've no idea what we have left at the end of the month. I know how much I have . I don't count every penny but I withdraw a fixed amount each week for the food shopping and discretionary spending (ie, coffees, odd bottle of wine, bits and pieces from Boots, odd bung for the teenagers, etc.). I also know what goes out in the context of petrol, pet plan and vet bills, hairdresser and clothes, mobile phones, etc., and I have a savings account for Christmas, for holiday money, school trips, etc.. None of that is done on an overly extravagant basis on the basis of our overall income. I have enough to put a bit else aside.

We could afford very expensive cars but don't regard them as a priority, a need or something we want. I have a modest mpv for which I paid cash when it 10 months old and I keep my cars until my mechanic says something like "you're probably going to have to spend about £2,000 on that in the next 18 months" which is usually when the car is about 9 years old; DH has a specialist economy car because he drives to central London every day.

I wouldn't put £40,000 to £50,000 in a tin box with a lock on and leave it outside my house in the knowledge that every day there would be a little bit less in the box. That is utter madness.

For goodness sake buy yourself a decent two year old Ford for that price.

Conversely, I have a 120k miles 10 year old estate which is completely trouble free, again owned from new (it was my company car, which I bought at the end of the lease). The problem is that cars at that age are hit and miss, and you can be lucky or unlucky with them. Buying them at that age is even more hit and miss, even with the help of a skilled assistant.

Paradoxically, it's easier to run cheap cars if you're comfortably off. If you've got the price of a new car in the bank, you can run one (or, better, two, so there's a spare on the drive) cheap cars, maybe quite classy ones that hover on the edge of "practical classic", because you can afford the unexpected bills and you can, if it gets out of hand, ditch it and buy another one for cash. You've got the money to tax and insure someone a bit bigger and more solid (fifteen year old Fiesta: probably a dog, fifteen year old C Class Estate: probably just about run in).

The reason why people with limited means buy small cheap cars with a manufacturer warranty new on credit is that it's guaranteed transport for a fixed price. Talk about how you wouldn't spend ten grand on a car usually comes from people who have got ten grand and can therefore afford to replace their cheap car at the drop of a hat. It's the equivalent of self-insuring: you save a regular payment in exchange for carrying a risk of needing to pay out a larger sum yourself.

I think it doesn't matter whether you have £100 or £20k spare each month. It is a question of priorities and values.

You prioritise a car. Dh does not. Perhaps he would see it as more sense to spend £9k on a newer Ford as I would . Perhaps he just doesn't value a car if it means giving up takeaways. That is important to him. Neither of you are wrong. You are just on different pages as to what you want to spend your money on. It doesn't matter what other people do, you just need to discuss this with dp and perhaps both of you need to compromise.

Maybe if you really can't agree, you split the money equally and you have "control" over your half?

btw the car is a 2009 Audi A5

Jesus Christ. Suddenly all my sympathy for you went away. That's a ludicrously expensive car to run. As a minimum it uses Y rated 50 section tyres, and some of them go down to 30 section tyres, so that's probably five hundred quid and up for a set of tyres. It will have been driven by an idiot, so the chances of it needing a clutch are high over the next few years, and that's a grand. They're heavy on tax, insurance and fuel. It's just a ponced-up Audi A4, ie a ponced-up Skoda Octavia, without the practicality or class of either of those. Your husband is right: 9K to buy an expensive poseur's car is a waste of money.

9K buys an 18 month old Golf, by the way.

thanks for the explanations of YNAB - I use a spreadsheet, but good to know!

OP - very different scenario then, if £400 is going spare - but your choice of course.

it's more like £400 - £500

So now you've got to factor in insurance, petrol, mot and service costs and have savings to cover any repairs.
And if you don't save up to pay cash for the car can you afford monthly payments out of this £400/£500.

So now you've got to factor in insurance, petrol, mot and service costs and have savings to cover any repairs.

As I said upthread, A5s are insane.

But I've run a succession of cars that had similar cost and complexity (five to ten year old "executive" saloons) and doing it for about £3000 a year is doable if you're a reasonable age and had the eight to ten grand to pay cash for the first car. Each year you pay out five hundred in tax and insurance and an average of a grand in maintenance, and put £1500 into a savings account to provide a buffer against bigger bills and to have the cash on hand to buy another one when the inevitable happens.

This is a slightly more upmarket version of bangernomics, and you can run things like Audi A4s, VW Passats, the sensible end of BMW 3 or maybe even 5 series, Merc C Class, smaller Lexuses, that sort of thing. Provided you are unsentimental and get rid when they get too old, and don't get carried away and start buying moneypits like old Range Rovers, you can have change out of £300 a month for everything apart from fuel and drive around in a nice, decently sized car which will be almost indistinguishable from when it was new.

You can do a cheaper version of the same thing (lower fuel costs, lower tax and insurance, hopefully lower bills) and drive around in five to ten year old Golfs and derivatives (Leons, Octavias, that sort of thing, not A3s as they are expensive and no better) for maybe £200 a month, again having bought the first one.

The problem is the "having bought the first one". If you have to borrow the initial five (for a decent Octavia) to ten (for a decent 320) and repay that over the life of the car, that's an additional £200 to £400 a month. Suddenly the "oh you can run it for £300" becomes £600. Of course, you could reduce the amount you're saving, but then (a) if your existing car goes bang you've got a loan and no car and (b) whatever happens it means you're going to have to borrow for the next car, and so the costs continue. At £500 a month, you're far better off getting a Polo on a Personal Lease.