To ask if you have a 40k household income how much your outgoings are?

[PantyGiraffe]

To help me see where we are going wrong!

I’m not working at the moment due to health problems. We have one child. No mortgage (paid for house in full on purchase). We live in a 2 bed house and our bills come to £800 including our car and mobile bills. Car was paid for cash and we don’t spend more than £60 a month in petrol.

Could people of a similar income tell me if their bills are less than this and if so how?

The virgin media bill is crazy! shock You could have Now Tv, Netflix, amazon prime and freesat (we have all these) and have pretty much every channel you could ever want and it would be a quarter of the cost you currently pay!

The virgin bill includes high-speed broadband, and that's probably worth a minimum of £20 a month. It's true that she could get this and a full Sky package for a lot less than £140, but only for a fixed period contract period, the out-of-contract price isn't that much cheaper than Virgin. But I suppose she can switch between Virgin and Sky whenever the current contract runs out, getting massive discounts each time.

But instead of nug!

Are you in a contract with virgin? That sounds like a full price figure, no one pays full price for virgin/sky!!

Mobile phones are really expensive,

Water, ours is £25 a month for 2 adults and toddler in a 4 bed house

Some of your bills do sound a lot but even with that it looks like you should have quite a lot left over? Our joint income is about 40k (I work part time to save on childcare) Monthly outgoings approx:

Rent: £1150
Council tax: £159
Childcare: £200-£300 approx (after some help from uc)
Gas/Electricity: £75
Water: £25
Broadband: £27
Netflix: £6
Mobiles: £60

We have super fast fibre broadband including line rental and anytime calls for £31 a month. We have now tv, netflix, amazon prime and freesat - our whole package costs a lot less than op is paying.

Sorry meant to say plusnet. For some reason it took that out of my post!

Same income here

Mortgage £600
Council tax £120
Water £50
Gas and electric £80
Phones £20
Internet £20
Netflix and now tv £12
Car insurance on both cars £50
Car tax £25
Pet insurance (2pets) £25
Home insurance £20
Life insurance £20

£70 a week on food shop
£50 a week petrol on both cars

This equals around £1500 a month

Similar income, bills are way more

Our gas and electric are £80 - OK
Council tax £162 - OK
Mobiles £110 - shocking! My husbands and I have got 2 x IPhone and we don’t pay this much.
Water £85. This is a lot are you rated or metered. Mine is £40 per month for 2 x adults and 1 x DC. DC and I take a lot of baths.
Car tax and insurance £45. - ok
Prescription prepayment £12 - ok
Life insurance £45. Could you get this cheaper?
Contents insurance £20. Do you have buildings insurance? Do you live in a high crime area? My contents/building insurance is £150
Heating/ plumbing cover £28
Sofa £20
Breakdown cover £17. Is this for 2 x cars. Looks expensive.
Pet insurance £15
Virgin media £140. Ring up and cancel! VM will call you back within days with a special offer. I didn’t this and pay £45 per month for 200mb broadband, phone line, talk weekend and the top tv package. They also frequently contact me with half price sky sports offers.
Charity £9

Your water bill seems high for a 2 bed property. We pay around £45 with Northumberian Water and our house has 6 beds/3 baths. Also, your virgin bill is extortionate! X

My husbands and my joint income is around that. We pay approx
£75 to nursery (thank goodness for 30 hours free childcare!)
£100 for after school care.
£23 per month swimming lessons. Mortgage £513 ( it used to be £817 but we remortgaged and our house value had risen so much we got a much better deal).
£96gas and electricity
£124 council tax
£33 water
£40 insurance
£250 food
£30 broadband

He puts £1100 in joint account each month and I put between £400-600 depending on how many hours I've been given at work. He pays all the car stuff and petrol with his account as he uses the car and his mobile phone bill.

We bring home just over 40k per year between us. Two adults and no DC.

Mortgage - £300
Council tax - £110
Gas and electric - £60
Water - £40
Mobiles - £50 for two
Broadband - £22
Netflix/NowTV/Prime - £20
Car insurance - £600/year for two cars, paid annually.
Car tax - £150/year for two cars, paid annually
Pet insurance - £40 (two cats and a dog)
Fuel - £30 a week each, as we both need our cars for work.
Life insurance - £20.
Contents insurance - £20
Prescription prepayment - I pay £18/month for my prescriptions.

--

Heating/ plumbing cover - none.
Sofa - we don't have any payments like this. Everything is bought outright.
Breakdown cover - none. This is included in our annual car services.
Charity - we don't donate to charity.

Food comes to about £75-£100 per week for two adults, two cats and a dog. I could bring this down lower but I have no need to. We also eat out once/twice a month at a cost of about £50 a go.

We save approx £500/month. We're currently doing up the house so half of this goes on paint, wood, plaster, etc. The other half goes into a generic savings for things like holidays, car repairs, etc.

For the majority of bills the amount shouldn't depend on your income, you wouldn't pay more for anything if you suddenly earned £75k a year would you?

Do you seriously use comparison sites for all your bills every year? If you don't you're very likely to save a significant by carefully checking all your contracts.

I don't understand.
Our income is similar but we pay £650 mortgage and £650 childcare every month, before bills.
Why do you even need to worry about bills?

Virgin media £140

Is that a month? 😳

You can get super fast broadband for about £30-35 a month (I use plusnet and got a £70 voucher for switching and we don't pay anything extra for phone line) and then sky sports and sky movies as part of NowTV for about £20-30 a month too.

That'd save you about half the money a month if they're feasible alternatives.

I just negotiated Virgin down. I was paying over a £100 a month and got it to £55 for phone, broadband and tv now. Threatened to go to sky.

I also only pay £25 a month per mobile.

And a water meter might be worth asking about.

I earn £35k, I am a single mum and get no maintenance payments. We live in a 4 bed with a fairly low mortgage.

Mortgage £360
Gas and electric £137
Council tax £167
Mobiles £20
Water £26
Car tax, service and insurance £50
Prescription prepayment £4.50
Life insurance £35
Building and Contents insurance £35
Heating/ plumbing cover £0
Breakdown, mobile phone and ww travel (through bank) £13
Pet insurance £15
Amazon prime, netflix and now tv (on and off), tv lic, internet, £70
Charity £5
Petrol £120
Food £300 (trying to reduce this)
Clothes for 13 yo £50
Pocket money £20
Pet food £70

Obviously the above does not include clothes for me, car/house/garden maintenance, outings, socialising, birthdays and Christmas and holidays. I have around £500 per month left to cover all this and any unexpected expenditure.

Incoming per month

Our set monthly outgoings are-
Childcare 200pm
Electricity 50pm
Life ins x2 70pm
Phone bills x2 70pm
Health insurance 200pm

Actually forgot house insurance I think that’s about 30 per month

We're £42k joint income as a family of 4 in a 3 bed semi and ours are:
Mortgage - £540
Council tax - £140
Childcare - £120
Home insurance - £18
Phones - £20
TV/internet/Netflix/Prime - £35
Life insurance x2 - £30
Opticians - £15
Both cars tax/insurance - £120
Water - £26
Gas/electricity - £60

Just taken out a loan for £130 a month as we both need newer cars than our current 2007 plate falling apart ones! We spend about £300 on food. Our children our both preschool age so pay for no clubs or lessons or anything yet thankfully.
Your TV package is astounding me. We have non fibre broadband (we live in he sticks) and use streaming services. We also both have SIM only phones after our contracts finished last year.

On 40k gross with no mortgage/rent you shouldn't be struggling. Your bills don't look excessive to me - you could cut down the mobiles and I would do away with the extortionate virgin media but as you're not paying housing cost then really you shouldn't need to in order to live comfortably

If you save £500/m you'd still have a huge chunk of spends.

You're obviously used to spending a lot of money per month on something you've not mentioned - do you smoke/drink/shop a lot? Are you economical with your food bill or do you shop every day/get a lot of takeaways/convenience food? Lots of holidays/short breaks? There has to be something.

As an aside, when comparing wages - bringing home £40k is not the same at all as earning £40k before tax. Pension will also make a difference. And a combined household income of £40k gross with both people working will give a greater take home pay than a single £40k salary because there's less tax paid overall due to two personal allowances.

Your water bill seems quite high, ours is about £42 a month for a 3 bed semi.

Deffo ditch Virgin Media telly (keep the broadband) and go with Now TV, Netflix etc instead that will save you loads.

Water varies so much according to where you live too. 10 years ago we lived in London and we paid £200 a year, moved to Hampshire and now pay £86 a month! We also have to pay to have our water taken away (£45 a month) which we never had to in London! We are on a meter and big house and 6 of us but even so! I believe you can get your water bill capped though if someone is on some kind of disability benefit (if you receive this?).

@Janus it does vary, but always check for water leaks. We moved and for years I just thought our water bill was about £280 a quarter. We have a water meter and a slightly bigger house in a different area. So we didn’t question it and for 12 years that’s what we paid. It then started to creep up and I just thought the price had gone up.

And then one day a bill for £760 a quarter came in and I nearly died! Turned out after much investigating and digging up the drive way there was a piece of 1930s pipe which had fractured and was gushing water. Had it repaired and the cost went down to £125 a quarter. Told my neighbour who helpfully told me that’s her usual bill. We over paid for all that time 🤦🏻‍♀️