To wonder how people afford holidays!

[Dreaming34]

I mustn’t be budgeting very well on food etc and me and my DH have a joint income of 75k, we really struggle at the end of every month and we cannot afford to go on holiday! Everything is so expensive really we are really struggling

I'll also add that, when Covid hit and we were worried about being made redundant, I analysed our spending.
We were spending £500 a month in various supermarkets, for 2 people - both in the form of weekly food shops and extra pop-ins for wine, snacks and missing ingredients etc. I was horrified!
I've now brought that down to £280 a month.
It's amazing how much these things can add up.

I live in the NW, manchester way, nowhere near as pricey as London etc, don’t know how you do it!

With two kids, yeah you'll struggle to get a cheap holiday, I mean you're confined to school holidays which are always expensive.

Unless you cut back on outings and extras, then you'll not manage to save much more unfortunately.

We used to spend around £200 but we have swapped to Lidl and are making an effort to reduce and it’s close to the average of £107 per week for a family of 4.

I must admit I go to the supermarket and don’t really care what I spend. If I didn’t do that we could go on holiday! Constantly filling the fridge up with innocent smoothies, fruit, yoghurts etc

I felt rich then too. Then I had kids, moved house to accommodate them and BOOM, not spunking all my cash in john Lewis anymore.

We spend ~£700 pm on food, trying to get ot down to £500. Shop at aldi, rarely buy treats out etc.

We get the ferry over to France and go camping. Can do 2 weeks Inc spends for 2k. Our income is higher than yours, we have no debt and nothing on tick and I still can't fathom how ppl spend so much on holiday.

You've got great capacity to change then! My kids get innocent smoothies about once per year, hence how I can afford 2 weeks camping in France on a household income of around 120k 😇

£3 for a pack of 5 strawberries in Tesco! It is absolutely bloody scandalous

Buying brands will make a huge difference, maybe try the scan as you go and go down a brand on what you can. 20% saving will be £140 a month. Do you have any debts? How much do you spend on clothes etc?

I'm a single mum on £22k and I have recently returned from 10 days abroad and have 2 haven weekends and a camping trip booked. You shop around and budget. This is controversial I know but I take my children out of school in term time for our abroad holiday once a year. I can't afford school holiday prices. I fiddle around with airports and dates, and look for free child places. Sometime 10 days is the same price or less than 7, particularly if you fly midweek.

You really need to have a look at your full spending.

Joint income slightly higher but pretty similar to yours with 1200 mortgage, 1000 nursery fees and can still afford holidays.

If you can’t go to the park without spending £20 each time on ice cream, never consider food costs etc then I imagine your money is just disappearing without you even realising. And I say this as someone who frequently gets a coffee when taking DD to the park, particularly in the morning but overall I just know where my money is going.

You need to watch eat well for less on iplayer for inspiration. And where are you buying ice creams for £5 each at the park?

By caring what they spend at the supermarket and not buying ice creams in the park. For less than £2 I can buy ice creams in the supermarket, if the kids want one they have one at home.

I'm also not staying in a hotel on holiday, it's an apartment somewhere pretty inexpensive. If you book in september the flights are cheaper and you can do it for a couple of grand or so. Or you used to be able to.

You presumably have some savings to fall back on then? If so, dipping into them a bit is an option that you could consider.

You’ll hopefully be spending less on child care once yours is in school, so you can replenish the savings then.

I just checked. It’s £2 for a punnet of around 15.

I only ever holiday in the UK.I
I put a deposit down the year before and pay it up over the year.I
I have always done this so it's never one big expense

We have a joint income of 40k and are fine on this/ saving a little.

We buy lots of children's clothes from eBay and keep ours for years.

Buy what we can from Aldi, top up at Tesco and majority basics. Meat is a rare treat as we'll only eat happy meat.

Children activities limited - they'll have more in the winter eg, bouldering and then stop it in spring when they can climb trees instead!

Rarely buy food /ice creams out and about -
Take picnics and have cheap ice creams at home.

Buy fruit and veg seasonally.

Walk instead of drive if possible.

Lots of free days out - parks/ woods/ beach etc. cinema/ trampoline parks an occasional treat.

But we live in South Wales where life is cheaper than SE. We holiday abroad every other year only and book flights as early as poss and book air B and B. Use local supermarket for breakfast and some lunches, eat out once per day.

Just some ideas that may help.

We save to go on holiday. Our dc no longer do lots of activities which helps!

There are much cheaper fruits you can buy than strawberries- flat peaches are about 60p a pack with a Clubcard at the moment. And cherries are very cheap. Anyway… I know that’s not the point, it just stood out to me!

We are a family of 4, 2 of us disabled on highest rates of dla / pip and dh working full time. Our income is about £50k per year. We have booked a 4 star all inclusive break (£3.5k) for next year. Being honest we’ve bunged it on a 0% credit card and we will pay it off at £250 ish per month until we go so it will be paid off then and then we book for the following year etc. We’ve done that a few times. We just treat it like any other bill. However - it all depends on your outgoings doesn’t it? We don’t have a mortgage or rent (own outright) and have no childcare expenses (I don’t work). So really our holiday is like another bill to us. We do however spend a lot on food and energy and this year we are going to have to watch ourselves to make sure we hit that target of paying it off. We have a small amount of savings - enough to pay off the cc if disaster struck!

We have a similar income, live in the north but have hefty mortgage (£1k pm). Kids do some activities that cost a bit. But outside of that we don't have a lavish lifestyle. Aldi good shop costs about £70 a week for 4 of us, no car payments just fuel/insurance, don't eat out that often and rarely get take away. We tend to have 1 uk holiday a year and at least one abroad. Just depends where your priorities are.

But why would you buy that then? Buy a different, cheaper fruit instead. Or change to a cheaper supermarket.

We have a household income of around £55000 before tax, mortgage of £600.
3 kids (2 are adult now, so pay a bit of rent, which admittedly does help, although they eat their own body weight in food, so I guess it evens out in the end)

But even when they were smaller we still managed holidays almost every year, anything over the years from camping in Wales to Disneyworld Florida.

But we are quite frugal - we don't go out all that often, more usually we go to friends houses or they come to us, we shop in Aldi, we don't buy any designer clothes, all the activities the kids did were cheapish ones (scouts, football etc). We never felt hard done by, but we did make sacrifices to be able to afford the holidays we wanted.

It depends on what you want as a holiday but also it is purely luxury spend so can be harder to justify. We’ve been having the debate at home. We’re a higher income household- I’m more gung-ho about spending on experiences and my husband wants to be more cautious in a time of rising cost of living. We’ve been back and forth on whether we should go for a more expensive holiday next year or not and the not is probably winning out at the moment. On paper we should absolutely be able to afford it but would feel happier saving for it first rather than committing to financing something at a later date.

Could you afford a holiday during term time, so much cheaper.

I hear you. Holidays have doubled in cost this year!! Extortionate.

Our household income is a few grand lower but we have no childcare to pay for. We spend about £120-140 a week on groceries but that includes some booze, cleaning products, shampoo etc- that's for 2 adults and 2 primary age dc. We meal plan and cook mostly from scratch and covers pretty much all of our meals (kids take a packed lunch to school 4 days a week). We have a week UK holiday a year and 1 or 2 long weekends (usually camping for one and a lodge type place for the other). We budget pretty carefully though.