Found out we are nearly broke -

[Pollss]

I thought we were doing well but DH told me we are almost broke.

We are mid 40s & 2 kids in primary school.

Joint gross income is £68k.

We have £190k outstanding on the mortgage on a house worth £525k

We have about £15k in savings and DH has £10 company shares. The children have about £5k each in their ISAs.

i thought we were in a much better financial position. DH has always been a saver whilst I have been a spender. He handed me 6 months' credit card statements and there were just 100s of pointless transactions: coffee, pret, McDonald's, cinema trips costing £50 a piece.

DH doesn't talk to me about our finances because it usually ends in bickering. I was hoping to move to a larger house as our current one is too small but £525k gets you nothing in London.

what can i do to improve our finance situation

I'm going to put aside the crassness of your OP and assume you do want to change things in your life.

This is entirely doable. I'm a saver, but in recent years as we've had more disposable income our lifestyle changed to include more treats and carefree spending.

In January we had unexpected (but unavoidable) costs of about £20K which put a big dent in our savings.

We made immediate changes - no takeaways, no takeaway coffee, no holiday this year, no buying lunch, no new clothes or shoes etc. and in ten months we've saved £10k

I know we're extremely fortunate to be able to do this - and to be very clear, the lifestyle changes I listed haven't added up to £1k a month cos we were already saving every month, but they've certainly made a difference of several hundred pounds each month and apart from no holiday I wouldn't say any of the changes have been major.

You both have to be on board for this to work.

I also track everything we spend on a spreadsheet - even when we are not trying to cut back. This makes it easy to see where we can save when we need to - and sometimes it's a bit of a wake up call at the end of the month anyway (eg we spent XXX on eating out last month)