I just don't have enough money

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Me and my husband are really struggling with money at the moment for the first time in our whole lives.

We have been together pretty much all of our adult lives.
We were on one income for nearly 10 years while I was a sahm, in all that time we never once had any worry about paying our bills and even managed to save 15k for a house deposit (first in our whole family to buy a house, took years of hard saving to try to get us out of renting)

Now I have had a job for the past 2 years so our money should have increased but its felt even tighter due to prices of everything increasing, of course our children are getting older too so we are feeding them more and other expenses such as bus fair etc is cropping up.

I started taking in ironing and cleaning as new way of making a bit of money on the side as things are getting tight. I made £85 this month on the side and this is the first time in our entire lives that we have struggled to pay the mortgage.
Thankfully we have always had a couple of hundred in savings which we dipped into for this months mortgage payment.

we shop second hand and cook from scratch, I follow all the tips and tricks to save money (batch cooking, paying in cash etc ) I follow martin Lewis and save save save every penny and its just not enough.

I had to decline 2 party invitations for my children this month because I couldn't justify the cost of 2 cards, 2 sets of bus fair. didn't even think about the fiver to put in the card.

I just don't get it, we both work. I even made some money on the side this month and I had to say no to a child's birthday party for 2 of my children.

we don't even drive so I couldn't even save money that way.

I don't know why I'm posting a moany little rant but I'm so stressed, our savings have been depleted by bills despite us living even more modestly than when we were on 1 income. I just don't fucking get how I can get more money.

I'm saying it's an option and one that could work really well for OP and / or her husband if they sign up for casual care / support work that's flexible and they do it for a while. It's not like the work isn't there.

We live in a former mining town and there's an ironing shop and another which does alterations and ironing,
.

Lots of employers have a rep for being awful, but they pay good wages and OP has bills.

While your husband is part time he needs a second job. Is he any good at gardening? My friends husband was laid off in a niche industry they'd just had a baby. He started in retirement area, just cutting the grass, cleaning paving. Simple jobs but £20 per hour. They then started asking him to do simple DIY tasks which added to his income. That tided them over.

As for the OP my friends did evening jobs. One stacked shelves in a supermarket, another filling boxes for online deliveries. Another worked in a pub, restaurant.

Long term I went to college and retrained was hard studying but I enjoyed using my brain which was mush after six years SAHM. My friend did open university and retrained as a teacher.

The average salary in 1980 was about £6k, and in 1985 it was about £10k. Your father was earning literally at least twice the average salary. The average house price in 1985 was about £34k, so your house was also well above average. Don't forget he probably would have also benefitted from MIRAS.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/adhocs/009222newearningssurveynesandannualsurveyofhoursandearningsashepublicandprivategrossweeklytimeseries/006332nesandashepublicandprivategwetimeseries.xls
Current average salary is £37k, so somebody equivalent to DF would be on £74k. Average house price is just shy of £300k so wages/house price multiple is definitely adrift, but in plenty of areas you could still buy a house for 3x that salary (and much less).

You can’t have two parents working p/t to “fit around family life” if only one is doing the family life stuff. Either one needs to work f/t, or both p/t positions need to add up to at least a 1.5 fte.

@usernamealreadytaken I don't know what my dad earned in the 80s (or ever). I just know that money always seemed a bit tight when I was growing up- but the point is, for much of the time it was a single income home. It is simply not possible to have a single income house today unless one parent is an extremely high earner (£100k+).

I have looked up average salaries for the late 80s, and I am getting £19k back. So that means the house was twice the average annual salary. Nowadays, there are no homes that are twice an average annual salary.

@GRex 1980 average wage was £8,283, rising to £10,200 or so in 1990. £38k was really not double a low income wage, no.

Please Google average UK salaries for the late 80s.

I don't know anything about your dad's circumstances, I'm sure he did well and you're proud of him, but he was not a low earner on £20k when he was buying a £38k house.

I don't know what his salary was in the 80s (or ever). I quoted the average UK salary in the late 80s- not his salary.

Oh do give over, most single income households earn nowhere near £100k and manage!

i did specify 1980 and 1985, but the ONS figure for 1990 average salary is between £11k and £16k, so not sure where your £19k is coming from.

I think everyone’s already driven home the point that you maybe need to work more hours, or your husband look at switching companies/jobs if he can possibly get more hours - can’t imagine trying to survive on two part time wages. It’s tricky enough for my family with one full-time and me part-time!

Some things I’ve done to help get us out of Shit Creek money-wise in the past:
Survey sites. Some are better than others. I do YouGov, it takes a while to reach the £50 cash out but I’ve also had other opportunities come from it such as paid studies. In past year I’ve made about £350 from YouGov. I’d also recommend FiveSurveys, you do 5 surveys and cash out a fiver. Go for shorter surveys if they have them, check back through the day and on an evening I can earn £10 while watching TV some days. Prolific is a popular one but I’ve had less luck with it.

Selling stuff. Unworn clothes, collectibles I don’t care for anymore. I use Vinted mostly and a bit of eBay. I also do reselling sometimes, it’s a bit of a prick move for newly-released collectibles and in-demand items but you’ve gotta do what it takes to feed your family. You can also scour charity shops for things to resell, sometimes designer clothes and rare stuff makes it onto the shop floor for cheap. Luckiest I’ve had was a vinyl record I bought for £1 and sold for £500 on eBay. Selling on outgrown kids clothes is a big help for us and buying the next size up on there too.

I’d sack off TooGoodToGo as even though it’s cheaper than the retail for those items, most of it can be gotten cheaper at the supermarket. Guess it’s good for special treats rather than a full-price takeaway. A recent good one for us was swapping from doing full shops at Sainsbury’s (our weekly shops had gone up to £140 for three people, absurd!) to doing frozen and cupboard at Iceland and rest at Sainsbury’s. I’m limited to who delivers as I don’t drive but a cheaply stocked freezer is making a big difference.

Some cards like Revolut offer introductory offers such as spending £5 on it and getting £20 free or similar. Last year I made £60 doing that on a few different cards that I just withdrew the reward money and haven’t used since. Some trading platforms offer free shares you can sell for using people’s links, some that do this are Trading212 and Webull. It’s £50 here or there or more if you’re lucky.

I found out about all these weirder side hustle type things on The Fun Money Club (used to be a Fb group but now on Instagram and its own app) and /r/beermoneyuk on Reddit. Lots of good ways to get free bits of money here and there.

Hope your situation gets easier! It’s so scary when you don’t know where all the money is going and there’s just not enough even with all the budgeting in the world.

@usernamealreadytaken i did specify 1980 and 1985, but the ONS figure for 1990 average salary is between £11k and £16k, so not sure where your £19k is coming from.

I conceed that Google can be wrong sometimes, and I do not have a living memory of the 80s (I suspect you do), so I will accept what you are telling me.

Regardless, my point still stands. A house at £38k in the late 80s would be about 3.5 times the average annual salary.

Google tells me the median salary today is £37k and the average house price is £271k. So house prices are 7.3 times the annual salary. That is truly disgusting.

The only way to have more money is to make more money - all that nonsense about 'cooking from scratch', 'sewing own clothes' and 'making own soap and washing liquid' makes no sense, apart from draining you, wasting your time and un-focussing you from making more money. Change your job? Do you have children? There was a post here a while back - sahm started studying together with her Scottish kid, initially helping them with their homework and then 'going deeper'. Just ordinary school stuff, with the help of YouTube and textbooks. The result was outstanding (she was not a teacher, or tutor, she was just studying together with her child). The results were outstanding, she started doing it with other people's children for real money. A friend of mine bought a food van, started running it near a uni, went bust and undeterred, she is now a private chef for small parties. She does themed dinners/lunches, booked ages in advance, loves it, word of mouth, popular, good income. There has got to be something better than ironing, money-wise I mean.

Getting a mortgage and having your own home is a big step up from relying on benefits to pay rent. You both work, what hours do you do? On minimum wage your can claim UC to top up income. We're all feeling the pinch, not easy. Xxx

I'd also be a bit worried at this point about pensions if you're both on low wages.

I think it would be good for one or both of you looking into retraining and upskilling. In your position I'd be looking around for evening or weekend jobs in the interim (care jobs and service industry jobs can be good for this). A nice perk from my part time bar job was getting free lunch/dinner!

I think you've done an impressive job so far keeping your costs low and managing your expenses, but costs don't look like they'll be coming down any time soon. I'm a high earner and still have a weekend job for guilt free spending!

Yea . Ridiculous. They both need to work more hours . It’s a ridiculous thread actually. And op hasn’t been back . She just wanted a vent . She knows the answer though .

It’s an interesting side discussion! (My parents’ first house was £10k in the 1970s; I forget salaries but my mum showed me a payslip once – something in excess of £2k a year.)

But OP’s house was cheaper than the national average and her mortgage looks reasonable: it’s her household income that’s the problem. And that’s not a “salary vs houses” thing, that’s a “no one’s working full time” thing. Plus without further insight from the OP, I suspect a bit of a “frittering on things and not keeping track of everything such as insurance, annual bills like TV licence, and other sundries” thing.

You can’t compare the 70s in any way - mortgages weren’t mainstream then in the way they are now. So house prices were lower.

I’m not comparing! I’ve called that a side discussion and put the 1970s in brackets as part of a side discussion. House price changes and OP’s ownership is completely irrelevant to her money issues.

If you want statistics, you need to look up reputable sources like ONS or Statista. This has the medians by band (as you seem to be switching between average and median); you can see that the £20k is nearer the 90th centile for salary:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/adhocs/13876earningstimeseriesofmediangrossweeklyearningsfrom1968to2021.

Now you suddenly don't know what your dad even earned, the conversation becomes pointless. A high earner being able to support a family was never in question. Two people sharing a single lowest income would be £6094 in 1989 according to this chart. The £38k house would have still been 6* that salary, and out of reach. Possibly in some areas in the late 1950s there was a period where one low salary went further, but that was the anomoly rather than now.

Now, house prices are generally a huge issue. They went from £24k in 1980 to £60k at the start of 1990, that's an insane increase; house price inflation of 300% while salaries increased only 20%: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-2921526/House-prices-risen-6-9-year-1980-according-ONS.html#:~:text=HOW%20HOUSE%20PRICES%20HAVE%20GROWN,number%20fell%2047%20per%20cent. This was continuing a trend from the 1970s and people with good salaries who got in early like your dad really benefited. In many cases, housing cost is a really big problem and makes families struggle. In this particular case however, housing is the one thing that isn't an issue for OP, they have a really low mortgage. Even though they ideally need to remortgage to save a few £'00 per month, the cost is not problematic as under 1/3 (of a very low) salary.

You need to honestly look at which of you has the better earning potential and increase the chances of them getting a career. It may well be you, OP. You’re going to have to think about wrap around care, if you don’t use it already, to go full time to get a better range of jobs.
Don’t risk being made homeless because your DH can’t get more hours. Could one of you do a weekly antisocial hours shift? Just one Sunday and Saturday morning cleaning job in my trust would bring you in an extra £700 due to antisocial hours bonus. Sunday is £18 per hour, band 2. There’s better money to be made than ‘taking in ironing’.

Have you checked on "entitled to" their eligibility checker to make sure you're not missing out on any financial support such as UC?

its very unlikely OP would get UC, I’m a single parent with two kids, one low income and only get £190. If you don’t have housing/ disabilities it’s not much

OP has stated they are actively looking for extra work.

If they had written they only want to work 30 hours and sit watching daytime TV for the rest of the time you would have a point.

My niece is housed and has received over £300k in benefits to date plus her adult daughter is now signed off long term sick. There is no reason why the pair of them cannot work so yes, I do feel strongly for people who are employed in low paid jobs (we cannot all be rocket scientists) and getting nowhere.

OP won't be back, we've scared her off...

If they were both working full-time and still struggled to make ends meet I would be incredibly sympathetic - instead OP is on here wondering why they can’t support a family of five on what is essentially a bit more than one minimum wage income.

My sympathy is with those who are working all the hours they can and still can’t pay the bills, not with those who have had years to build up hours and income and who chose not to.