Is our monthly budget unrealistic?

[Ginghamricecakes]

Bit of a boring post, sorry!

About to buy our first home, two adults, we live in the north, combined income of 3k per month.
We have budgeted:

£700 mortgage
£600 bills (council tax, house insurance, gas, elec, internet)
£300 direct debits (gym, pet insurance, phones, Netflix...)
£400 travel (petrol, car insurance, tax)
£250 food

Left over cash to spend/save: £750 p/m

Is this reasonable? Are we over/under estimating or forgetting anything?

"£600 bills (council tax, house insurance, gas, elec, internet)
£300 direct debits (gym, pet insurance, phones, Netflix...)"

These seem higher than I would expect.

A few posters have mentioned the bills being high.
Is there anyone else with a 3 bed semi in the north, who can give me an estimate of their household bills. Our council tax is £140 p/m.

Grocery spends will vary enormously depending on where and how you shop.

Organic everything, fresh fish, branded cleaning products and posh ready meals from Waitrose will cost two or three times the cost of shopping in Aldi or Lidl.

Jeez after my bills and rent paid today I’ve got a grand total of £160 for food, petrol, toiletries, entertainment, clothes etc for the month!

You’ll be fine!

If it helps I pay a mortgage/bills etc and everything else on just over half of your joint income

Bills- gas electric water house ins internet and council tax £350 as North
DD - Netflix gym pet insurance phones £180

Your left over cash seems ok but it looks like you're overestimating your monthly bills!

We found we spent approx an etc £150-200 per month in the first 6 months of living in our first house, because of random repairs, furniture, paint etc.

Just seen your council tax is low , change bills to £315
Water £50 if no meter
Gas/electric £90
CT £140
Internet £35

Water much less if meter .

We have an extended (still 2 beds but we doubled the size of the downstairs) 2 bed semi in Leeds. I always shop around and get deals, so our bills are probably lower than average.

Gas and electricty is £97 pm, we're not particularly careful, leave lights on, doors open, heating on, but have a well insulated house and efficient combi boiler.
Water is about £35 pm - we can't have a meter due to shared pipework, which would probably be cheaper for you so we're on an assessed charge, which is a bit of a hybrid between rates and a meter
Council tax about 95 (band A)
Broadband/phone is £20 - just signed up to a Virgin Media deal, we'll change again when it runs out.
Television licence 13
mobiles 16 for two sim only contracts and then we buy mid range smart phones outright every 2/3 years, which cost around £250 a time, so call it £30 for mobile phones if on contract including the phone
Netflix and sometimes Now TV about £10

Is that everything we're calling bills? Total £300 pm. Plus about £20 for buildings and contents insurance. We don't have gym memberships.

We have 4 cats and their insurance is about £50 pm in total. Obviously you've got to feed the buggers too, although they do go out to catch their own dinner more often than I'd like, so have you counted petfood, litter, flea and wormers etc in groceries?

I don't know how much we spend, but we foster and do get some food supplied, but some of it we pay for ourselves, which is a small price to pay for a free no long term commitment supply of kittens to play with.

Have you accounted for savings for replacing cars?

It’s plenty I have less than that left over to clothe and entertain 3 kids plus pay lessons etc. We still manage to save money for holidays etc plus have Christmas etc money away.

Were up north in a 3 bed semi.
Council Tax £122 per month. All our bills and direct debits come to about £650 in total.

There are 3 of us and I budget £60 per week for groceries, so £240 -£300 per month depending on 4 or 5 week month.

Your budget sounds just fine, always better to over estimate then you build a buffer if needed

£600 a month on bills seems high.

I’m in a 3 bed but renting (me and 2 teens), we spend around £250 on food a month so it’s doable for 2 people.

I put £80+ a month into savings for emergency car repairs, washing machine etc.., anything left in December gone as towards Christmas (obviously not all of it if there’s a lot there). I spend £40 a week on travel (so £160 pm). About £400 on bills, we don’t have sky and just have basic broadband package.

I probably only have around £400 a month left to cover clothes, school trips and earring out.

Hi. I’m in the same situation and seems very reasonable. Someone said £250 won’t cover food... we do 2 big food shops a month and occasionally go to the shop for bread/milk etc and only spend £200 a month ish. You may be able to throw a few take aways in there ;)

When we bought our house, we forgot about little things like TV license but if you have that much left over at the end of the month, you should do just fine! Congrats on your new house x

Looks resaonable and does not include what for us was always one of the biggest exenses - childcare costs as we both worked full time so either that would be 3 full time nursery places )(baby, 1 year old and 3 year old at one point) or paying one person to mind all three (usually cheaper) - all with no state subsidy in our day and indeed even today you do not get much for a baby and toddler sy £2k each even if you pay £24k per nursery place in inner London.

For gas we pay £55, electric £45 and water £38. However we are down south so I don’t know if it makes a difference. We are also 3 bed semi.

Defo need more for food.

Me and my ex did it on a 2,000 budget an that was a 4 bed detached with huge gardens and 2 of us plus 7 kids... (only 2 full time and a dog!

Your bills sound rediculously high an our mortgage was half of yours
I'm north west don't know if that changes anything but inc in my budget was insurance for home an dog, car an car insurance, tv , broadband, gas , electric, water, council tax , kitchen on finance and a bank loan we got to get the house plus food an clothes.
Literally everything came to around 1,500 an we had 500 spare for the rest of the month and then everything else went into savings.

Just about finding the best deals ! X

This is really helpful, thank you.
It's a mystery to me how people manage to put 2+ children in nursery full-time.

Suggestions that £600 for a bills is expensive, has made me feel a little better about our budget. Hoping that I've over estimated and we will have more left over to save. I know that a lot of our direct debits are unnecessary luxuries as well, so they can go, but I'd rather hold on to life's small luxuries if I can !

@Sweetpeach3 that's good to know, we are north west too. We are running two cars though, and as you say £600 mortgage.

More for food.
Where's your fun money?
Are you saving for something specific?

600 for bills? That seems insanely high to me. What’s the breakdown for that?

Think you're overestimating your bills, I'm in the North too. I've just checked and for me Council tax, water rates, gas, electric, house insurance, and broadband come to £333.91

I think your bills and direct debits sound high but that partly depends on the gyms you go to and the mobile contracts you have. We run a bills account from which mortgage/utilities/council tax/contact lenses/insurance/gym/phones etc are taken, and have another account for food and other spends. We then have long term and short term savings accounts for holidays/christmas/cats etc. It works well for us and allows us to see that we pay more than necessary into the bills account, so every now and then we use the slush to over pay the mortgage. It might work well for you too while you're getting to grips with the costs of your new house.

Fun money is whatever is left after we have decided how much we want to put away each month, out of the £750 left over.
At the moment we are only spending £250 on food, and that's with a Friday night take away, bit we do shop in Aldi and bulk buy from Costco too.

The £600 for bills is a total stab in the dark, I've just budgeted for that because we have no idea how much our household bills will cost each month, and I figured it surely couldn't be more than £600 pm.

It looks like a very generous budget and you could live pretty comfortably on it. Echoing that the £600 is too high for bills.