To wonder why it feels like we have no money?

[Wheredoesitgo]

DH and I earn well between us. We aren’t mega wealthy or even close but we should be very comfortable and I just feel like we aren’t.

I just feel like we have no money? DH is self employed and had a tough few months last year and the tax return coming up isn’t helping but even month to month my earnings just seem to disappear with not a lot to show for it…

Would love to go away (2 primary school aged DC) but a week in Spain in July (just before school holidays by a few days to try and reduce the pride a bit!) is coming in at around £1100 plus each for a week AI (we spend less this way with the kids than self catering usually as they are fussy). They need spring/summer wardrobes but feel like I can’t really buy new and can only afford bundles on Vinted which I never find exactly what I want.

I dread the food shop as there’s just no way to get it cheaper.

I’d love some new boots but can’t justify the cost.

As I said we earn quite well so it just seems crazy to me that things feel so tight - anyone else in the same boat?!

@shuggles it’s not oversized lol but yes we could get a cheaper one when this finance agreement allows

You sound like a person with your head screwed on, which is a breath of fresh air after seeing so many threads on mumsnet created by people on whopping £100k+ household incomes who claim that they are struggling.

It would be good if you shared any advice or tips you have about saving money.

Your car payment is £400, which is massive. Your car may not be oversized, but it is certainly overpriced.

Every car I have owned has been bought outright. I buy cheap cars and drive them until the wheels fall off.

As explained previously things like "PCP deals" or monthly car payments are just scams created by car companies to bleed money out of people.

You're spending almost £5k a year on a car you don't even own 😕

There seems to be a bit here on ‘depends how you look at things’.

On the budget you wrote out, there’s £500/month savings and £500/month ‘treat type stuff’ (the weekends and the ‘other’).

Thats £1k/month to work with.

So the reality is that with a very high mortgage (partly a reflection of the short term?), and a high car cost, and wanting to put money into savings, and have expensive weekend activities every weekend - then there isn’t also space for much holiday money.

Comparison really is the their of joy, and social media is bad for encouraging that. It only gives you the edited highlights.

So you’ll see:
Millys family in Lapland, but not the 35yr mortgage term.
Josie’s family at the trampoline park every weekend, but not the lack of peak season abroad holiday.
Sarah’s family with two premium cars, but not that their mortgage is minimal after a high deposit after parents death during their teenage years got a big life insurance pay out.
etc etc.

Pretty much everyone makes choices on which bits they channel their discretionary budget into. Just some people do that quite actively, and others inadvertently. It sounds like you’ve inadvertently got into routines of pretty high casual week in week out spend, that didn’t leave a lot of wriggle room so savings didn’t have as much headroom as may have been ideal for boiler and tyres, and the mortgage step has tightened things up.

Question is, do you prefer the trampoline park over the country park? And take away pizzas or meals out over supermarket oven pizzas.

And is that to the extent that you prefer them over going away on holiday. Either is fine, but picking where you put your ‘premium life money’ May make things feel more in control.

We've got netflix through Sky . Makes it cheaper.
Some of the films are not available through it, and there are some ads, but most things are.

Something in that region, a little less as I’m the higher earner so it’s not a straight 45/45 split and we don’t get 5k in child benefit as some of that is shared with DPs ex for their children.

anyway, my point was that on 120k the take home for them is higher than the 5k they cited for essentials, so the question is what that is going on? If a holiday is your priority and you have 1k+ a month left over then save at least half of that.

We've done lots of cheap holidays abroad, but they take a bit of planning.

For example, if you like Spain, have you considered the north? Fly to Bilbao, hire a car and drive west along the coast. It's beautiful, not many tourists and some cheap Airbnbs. Same for northern Portugal.

Or alternatively, a city break and youth hostel/ budget hotel. Brno, Bratislava and Budapest are fantastic for kids and the accommodation was a lot cheaper than we expected.

Solidarity OP- we earn about 80-90k overtime dependent- once you have paid the mortgage, the car, childcare, train fare , petrol, utility/insurance bills, food(which is horrendously priced now) we've dropped nearly 3.5k before we've even started.

Please, don't let on that northern Spain is nicer than the south.

Yea!! It’s these little things that means money comes and goes for me! Friends birthday presents, teachers leaving gifts, collections for this that and the other!

OK. As others have said, Sky etc is huge! We pay £58 Sky for TV with Sports / Phone / Broadband. £43 with Tesco Mobile for 4 x Samsung Phones & contracts. Deal hunt, negotiate, threaten to leave (and if need be actually cancel). Guides to all of this on MSE.

Also your work prob has a scheme where you get discounted gift vouchers / offers on days out meals etc. Explore and use it. 5% off food shop alone is £25 back a month.

Choose a current account or credit card that gives cashback on spending eg: Santander Edge - plus get cashback for switching etc.

I keep all my everyday money in a 4% account, nothing in current account, I just transfer daily as I'm notified. You can honestly save LOADS with just a little research & work on an evening or weekend.

Food in the UK is a good 30-40% cheaper than in most European countries, but rents/housing and utilities cost 30-40% more.

Our income is about the same, but between higher rates of tax and pension payments we bring in around £4.5k a month and half goes on the mortgage.

We also live south east, about 40 mins by train outside London.

Food and council tax are the biggest expenses alongside the mortgage. We bought the cheapest house we could find where we needed and the size we needed. It's definitely not a mansion!!

We have nice cars, mine is almost paid off and DH is not too far behind. We always do HP, rather than lease or Pcp as we at least own it afterwards. I drive a lot for work, so important to not be driving an old banger.

I think it's tough when the climate changed so suddenly. We went from feeling well off, to just about managing. But I thank my lucky stars every day that we have the situation we do, as I know millions of others are struggling much worse.

FYI- if you want sky tv, look at Now TV. Don't thi k I've ever paid more than £5 a month and we've been with them years!

I read that it only takes frittering away 27 quid a day on coffees, lunch etc etc and you’ve blown 10k a year

it’s not the big expenditure that kills you it’s all the little bit

This is it! The £300 ‘unbudgeted’ in the budget is things like school uniform and shoes (which mine seem to go through at least once a term lol) birthday gifts for other kids, Christmas and birthday for our own DC, any other ad hoc expenses really. New clothes when needed, family birthdays. The list is never ending lol.

Wow! Now that is crazy. I reckon DP probably spends 10-15 in the local shop most days! Ouch.

I know what you mean.

Earn nowhere near as much as you but we're constantly skint ATM.

Get to payday and we have nada left. Yet I'm previous years we were whacking away decent savings as well as going on holiday abroad and weekends away. We'd have a takeaway every Saturday if we weren't going out for a meal/drinks.

Now we don't do any of those things yet are struggling to pay off our holiday abroad this year (2.5K AI so not even that expensive as kids go free on our deal).

It makes me dread future years as when our kids get bigger and we have to pay for them (baby and toddler) then the cost will be 5K! That feels very out of reach currently as would mean saving £500 a month just for a summer holiday which just isn't realistic. Especially when we're broke at the end of the month already.

We don't have lease cars or anything either. Two little run arounds.

We could cancel Sky/netflix and our phone contracts though. That would save £700 year. But then that would mean we would be sat inside the house broke with not even evening box sets to watch. £700 isn't enough in savings to sacrifice something that gives us daily entertainment whenever we're stuck indoors.

The same for my weekly softplay and coffee playdate with my mum friends in winter. That's about £20 a week. I could not go and walk around a cold wet park with 2 under 2s instead to save the money. But again, that something I look forward too during the struggles of being on my own all day with 2 under 2s and gives me sanity. That again would save £250 across the year (only do it in winter, in summer we do park and coffees).

But then why bother working? Working long hours in a stressful job to not even be able to watch Netflix and socialise with friends and spend my day off walking around cold parks with screaming toddlers. Just to be able to save a small amount of money that'll end up going on a house repair.

I've been thinking some more about all of this, and somehow got on to Christmas.

Back in the Dark Ages of the 1970s/early 80s, nobody had 'Christmas bedlinen'. You just had your normal winter bedlinen all through Christmas like everyone else.

Similarly, nobody had a 'Christmas Eve Hamper' with new Christmas PJs, expensive hot chocolate, a Christmas mug to have it in, a book or a magazine, tickets to something thrilling, whatever. You advent calendar had a picture, not a chocolate and definitely NOT a toy in a little drawer.

Almost nobody did outside lights (I see families who I know have fairly limited budgets do complicated lighting displays; it all costs, and if you have 4 or 5 strings of lights or light-up deer, something will need replacing every year).

If you were taken to see Father Christmas, you were very lucky, and it was probably at the local Christmas fete, and it cost a couple of quid tops, and it was someone's dad in a bad beard, and what you got was never all that thrilling - it was meant to be something fun to give you something to play with in the week or so until Christmas. There was very little pressure to shell out £25 or whatever it costs now for the whole 'experience' at a local garden centre, complete with reindeer.

Almost nobody had Christmas crockery and a Christmas tablecloth - you just got out the white linen one and the best china, and crackers were by definition cheap and tacky.

Nobody felt compelled to buy a box of chocolates for their DC's teacher and TA, because (unlike now) teachers and TA's weren't doing little Christmas goody bags for the whole class. Don't get me wrong, the Christmas goody bags are fun, and lovely for those DC who will get very little at Christmas, but they up the ante for conscientious parents.

And nobody had a Christmas jumper that was worn perhaps a dozen times this year and a dozen times next before it was outgrown.

I can see a family with two young DC very easily spending a few hundred quid on all of that (new Christmas bedding every few years, adding new bits of crockery etc, new Christmas jumpers, all part of the cost).

It's no wonder people feel their budgets are so pressured, because the pressure to spend has become massive.

Just as a thought for cheaper foreign holidays - when my kids were little (3, 8 and 10 the first year we did it) we did home exchange holidays for three successive summers. We did it through what used to be a book called Home Exchange International, but now it's obviously done on the internet and you can google companies that do it. It meant we didn't pay for accommodation (the upside!) and it enabled us to go to Denmark the first year, Spain (near Barcelona) the second and southern Germany (near Lake Constance) the third. The downside is having to get your house very clean and tidy before you leave, and having to leave theirs as you found it. We had a great experience every time. We made a point of exchanging with people whose children were close in age to ours so the houses were geared to that age. We stopped when our oldest became a teenager, as it just wasn't suitable any more, but it's great for young children.

Not everyone would be comfortable doing this, and it's sensible to put away securely anything very precious that insurance or security wouldn't cover, but it worked really well for us. Yes, they're in your house, but you're in theirs. You do have quite a bit of correspondence before coming to an agreement.

These threads are fucking nuts to me.

£130k a year and you can’t afford a holiday abroad?

If it really is that bad then there is a clear solution….dont go abroad!

Mortgages of £2500 a month are crazy to me.

There are probably some areas that you can save in if you really look into them one by one. Your budget of £250ish for phones/sky/Netflix seems a lot. I have 2 teenage DC and between them, me and my DH we spend £26 for all 4 of us combined on sim only deals with Lebara. DC2 got a new phone for Christmas which was £140 for comparison in buying a phone outright, so only an occasional purchase cost. We use tesco club card vouchers for Disney plus, but go for periods without it (also use CV vouchers for cinema and breakdown cover) . And we have the cheapest Netflix with ads. I've literally this week been onto Virgin mobile and got my bill down to just over £50 a month (including basic TV). So all in all for 4 near adults we are spending approximately £90 a month. Not a quick fix possibly if you're tied into contracts but lots of savings to be had there.

Can you remortgage your amount outstanding over a longer term? We did that when I went on maternity leave and it made a huge difference.

Cars - I've paid for my tax, insurance (for me and DH named on my car) and MOT annually for less you pay per month for leasing . We have old cars and they do need fixing sometimes, but it's often only a few hundred a year in a local independent garage who are great. We've only had a couple of big expenditures in the last 15 years and kept the cars as long as its economic to do so. If we get a big cost, it's one of those things and it's to be expected but compared to the cost of leasing, we pay a lot less even with those one offs.

You don't need fancy days out. My teens remember all those trips to the park in the cold and rain and jumping in puddles far more than a trampoline park (one time in a huge puddle for 3 hours in the pouring rain when I nearly froze to death, but they loved it and remember it fondly 12 years on!). We play a lot of board and card games together as a family so are sometimes inside. We used to just stay in the UK for holidays when they were little but as they got older we'd wait for good deals to go abroad and build our trip ourselves - much cheaper than a package. It's not hard to do when you get into it. We eat breakfast and lunch in our room and then go out to eat but usually only main course. That keeps costs down. We did AI once and it didn't come close to being Value for money. Everywhere we go we take refillable bottles of water or cans we've bought in a multipack of 24 usually on a club card offer. I ask for water instead of tea, that's an occasional treat for me if I'm out. I take DC2 to a local youth club (it's for SEN kids) once a week and it costs me £4 for us to get in, me to have tea and him to have a can of Pepsi, but sometimes I'll take the can myself. We take a packed lunch out and eat it outside if we go out for the day. Both DS take packed lunch to school and college and that saves a bit. I rarely buy new clothes for any of us apart from when needed and these will be tesco/asda/matalan (they wear skechers trainers for college as they find them comfortable, which I buy from wynsors). My DC's get pocket money - they only have a few chores to do in return and if they want something they save up and use birthday and Christmas money to buy their own stuff You can save a little bit in a lot of places and it all adds up. I also try to sell old items like games and things like waterproofs, thermals etc on ebay and that brings a small amount in.

This isn't meant as a criticism, it's just suggestions of areas to save money. You really need to pick an area, look in detail and think where and how to cut down. And it's a lot easier with a joint account where you pay the same percentage of salary into it (as an aside) as you both need to be on the same page money wise. We dont feel we are skimping really, but we are careful on what we spend. DC1 is the same, DC2 (who has SEN) has no idea though, so we can see the difference between the pair of them and can extrapolate the problems they will have in adult life!

This makes a really good point.

There’s been a huge shift in what ‘normal’ spend covers.

Expensive smart phones are another area.

Event themed clothes blow my mind from so many angles. The cost, the waste.

Numbers of presents, value of presents and party’s being another one. When you know someone is spending upwards of £20/head on a birthday party then you don’t feel you can go the pocket money you route. When others are doing that for parties, then you don’t go for the party tea and cake and pass the parcel in the living room at home. And there’s another several hundred per child that’s seen as core budget.

Right.

The car dealers were probably pissing themselves with laughter when they agreed to that deal.

That is outrageous. It's easy enough to see where all the money goes. Life is just very expensive now. We certainly couldn't afford to do foreign holidays every year when the kids were young, I was lucky to have parents who had moved to the seaside.