Can anyone review my outgoings and advise on any cutbacks I can make?

[dovegrey18]

I think I've cut back what I can but I've listed everything anyway just in case I've overlooked anything.

Mortgage - 673 (100k on base rate and approx 100k on fixed rate per staff discount)
Council tax - 258
Factoring - 10
Electricity/Gas - 55
Tv, phone and broadband plus 1 mobile contract - 43
Tv licence - 19
Food - 200
Cleaner - (3 hours x 3) - 90
Sofa Finance 0% - 48
Nursery - 522
Car 1 - 453
Petrol x 2 cars - 400
Road tax x 2 cars - 40
Mobile - 30
3 x CC on 0% - 396

Car insurance x 2 is paid until July 2019
Home insurance is paid until November 2018

Cleaner - £90 saved
You have a phone and a mobile and then you have another mobile. Do you need 3 phones?

How much do you need to save?

Do you need 2 cars to get to work op?

Initial thoughts are cleaner is surely the first to go but also your food budget looks v low? Is this for 2 people?

Where is your water bill?

How much longer has each phone contract got to run?

Is the £473 car finance? That is huge. How much longer left on that?

Tv licence also seems high? I pay £12.12 pcm

Your car finance is insane.

Get rid of the cleaner and lower your standards. A cleaner is a luxury not for when you have debt.

Food is on the low side.

Why is your TV £19? Mines only £13

Can u reduce your mobiles ? £200 a month for food isn't much for 2 adults plus LO

Your council tax bill is enormous! You must live in a very expensive area? And car is very expensive - can't you trade it in for a cheaper car?

Sorry but if you have 3 credit cards that need paying off I don’t think you can afford a cleaner

I also think you probably need to look at getting a cheaper car, £453 a month is massive! Also £400 on petrol 😮 (I drive an electric car so have lost touch with petrol prices but that’s a lot surely?)

I think council tax totally depends on the area. Cities tend to be cheaper due to economies of scale. Mine isn't far off yours OP, I live in a small rural house.

Cut back on food and the cleaner

Could you reduce cleaner ?

Also what is factoring ?

Cleaner? Car finance is high. How long til you pay off cc bill?

I presume the second mobile is DP, sorry but I do think you can't afford the cleaner, also petrol is high, I presume 2 cars as you both work in opposite directions and can't car share, and have fairly long commutes
once phone is paid for get sim only deal, £10 per month gets you plenty of data and minutes.

I don't think you can get food for 3 down much lower than £50 per week all the time, and your child care costs will go down as your child gets older and hopefully your sofa will be paid off soon and concentrate on getting rid of cc debt by using cleaner money. The other way is to try and increase income, do you have anything you can sell?
,

Thats a lot of petrol do you have a long commute?

Uh cleaner??!!

Gosh lost my whole post

I'll try again.

Cleaner - I suffer from health issues and the stress and anxiety I feel with a house that's not clean is just not worth it. I have tried to cut the cleaner down and dh and i split remaining tasks but he has no interest in having a clean house so after a week or two he gave up. I am however open to some suggestions - maybe I could have alternate weeks instead? At the moment we have 3 cleans a month - 3 hours each.

We don't need a house phone but we can only get fibre to the home which requires a phone line (new build)

We need two cars because dh travels and I need to do pick up / drop off and get to work.

Food is for two adults and toddler. We can stick to £200 for food but we are terrible for takeaways so I am trying to focus my energy on more meal planning / Batch cooking for days when I'm unwell. Not having to worry about the house is giving me some mental space to do this

Water bill is covered by council tax

12 months left on my contract. Dh has just taken a sim only out as part of the £43 for tv phone and broadband

4 years left on car finance - Dh's luxury. We have savings to put into the car finance but it won't reduce the monthly payments, only the term. And we would prefer monthly payments to be reduced. The car has depreciated quite a bit since it was bought so it's not worth trading in for something cheaper now.

I'll check tv licence out - in Scotland if that makes a diff?

We are in a city so yes council tax is high.

Petrol is high for dh as he travels and me as my car is not economical. My car is bought but now running to the ground so will be buying something soon. It's only worth £700 now.

Interesting that some are saying god budget is low and others are sayin cut back.

Factoring - part of missives for surrounding areas. In a new build

CC is all 0% finance. We have savings but feel there is no point reducing CC when it's 0%. We are thinking of making an investment with savings.

Love how people are just jumping on the bandwagon about the cleaner saying we can't afford it since we have debt - I haven't mentioned our income. I just like to be review our outgoings regularly and cutback on what we can.

Thanks all for the input as it's good to hear a fresh perspective

I dont think anyone's jumping on the cleaner bandwagon if I'm honest, you asked for people advice on where you could cut back and looking at it that is the most obvious thing to cut back on.

Never ever keep savings if you have debt, even if it’s on 0%. You never know what is round the corner, so better to be debt free and then able to save much more, much more quickly.

You asked if you'd overlooked anything so weren't you asking for us to see what else you could save? You didn't ask 'can I afford it?'

You realise you do have a lot of debt? Whether you can afford it or not it have car, sofa, CCs - almost £1k per month is paying off things you've spent already. That's debt?

£200 is low for food & drink. I suspect if you added up all your coffees, takeaways, trip to the corner shop for bits it would be way more than that. I speak from experience when I realised I was spending £25 a week on brekkie/lunch/coffee in our work canteen!

Where's the fun money, the going out money, clothes money, saving for Xmas/holidays/birthday presents. Do you have any medical bills like opticians/chiropractor.

I think if youve got debt that you can manage that’s fine. Having some savings too for emergencies is good.

Re the car finance we reduced the term. Better than nothing right? We paid the monthly figure (£250) and then saved (£100/month) and put into into a separate bank account where we gained interest. The £100/month was calculated by deciding that we wanted to pay the car off in 3 years not 5. So I took the whole repayment amount and divided it by 5 years and multiplied by 2 years. Then I split the 2 years and divided it by 24 months. This then gave us the extra that we needed to save per month to repay in 3 years. When we got to 3 years we asked for a repayment quote which was less than the whole balance (because of interest) and so not only did we repay it early but we had about £900 leftover.

If you have 0% on your credit card I would see this as a good way of reducing your term and saving money. I would seriously consider using savings for this.

Relative to- what's your net joint income?

Tv package? Freeway/free view instead. Feeling flush add in turn occasional netflicks month.

Mobile contracts seem high.

Are you in childcare voucher scheme or whatever the new one is?

Someone has their head up their arse...