Why are we struggling to stay in our budget!

[Seasonofthewitch83]

I feel like every month we overspend (not on anything extravagant but everything seems to add up - a birthday card, a new secondhand pair of shoes for DD etc.

I struggle to budget on a granular level because I cant keep track of it - I dont think I would be able to budget so specifically e.g £10 a month birthdays, £20 a month toiletries.
On paper we have £400 a month left after bills/travel/food/nursery. So this covers DD activities, clothes, toiletries, a treat coffee out etc. Yet every month we seem to plough through this with nothing to show for it.

Is there an obvious way to manage this that I am missing? Would it be worth opening something like a joint Monzo account for the 400 so DH and I can use this for all additional spends to manage it?

I just stick to a spending routine and have the most basic bank account you can get with a separate debit card acc that you have to transfer money to if I want to spend. It’s a good way of keeping spending down - I never want to go back to living beyond my means again, it’s not worth the trouble and stress

You just need to add everything up. We’d been budgeting £350pcm for food and meals out for months. I added it up last month and it was £700!! Same for the last couple of months. So far this month we’ve spent £297 for two adults and have got enough food left for at least the next week/10 days.

There are definitely cheaper options than YNAB and you can do the YNAB method on paper or on a spreadsheet if you want to. But I have ADHD and with other methods I simply forget to input stuff for weeks at a time and then it's all impossibly backlogged and the task of catching up is incredibly daunting so I inevitably give up.

YNAB has built in protections against/fixes for that and that is the sole reason why it's worth it for me.

There are other benefits such as auto-syncing between my phone and computer, being able to enter transactions that recur so that they automatically input without me needing to remember, having unlimited number of categories (some paid options are limited), being able to move and recategorise between categories incredibly smoothly, the month to month roll over, the tools that show graphs are nice and motivating, and the goals are great - the fact you can set a goal some time in the future and it automatically calculates the amount, I can adjust this at any time and it will recalculate, taking into account what's already in there, if I choose to or need to contribute less one month it auto adjusts everything, I can also share with DH and DS1 so they can see what's in categories without constantly asking me. None of these things are total dealbreakers but I'm used to them and happy to pay for them.

It might be £80 a year but thanks to the yearly goal feature, I am currently saving up €8.79 a month and that's cheaper than a lot of other luxuries, like Netflix on a multi-screen package. It is worth it to me. I did the free trial and then signed up monthly for €15 per month for a couple of months so I could easily cancel if it didn't work for me but it really does. They hiked the yearly price a year or two ago and a lot of free/cheaper alternatives were launched around then so it's worth looking at those. I was already spoiled by YNAB so I couldn't move to any of them but if you're just starting out then why not look.

Yeah we were TERRIBLE for doing this. We said we needed to either cut back to bare essentials or just be realistic about what we spend.

Some really great advice here - thank you.

Great thread, I'm also a Ynabber & I bought a house as a divorced single mother but with some family help and zero debt other than mortgage two years ago. I currently have €6k on a 0% credit card to go on a massive holiday this year. Bf will pay me his share of flight money which will reduce this debt by €1k.

Hi
Moneyhub is great - it's a free app that lets you set individual budgets and you can link bank accounts and credit cards and it tracks spending. You can tag everything in categories and it automatically suggests categories which are quite sensible but you can manually override. May be worth a go - sounds similar to YNAB (although I've not used this) but it's free. I would recommend - I'm amazed at how much I am spending in some categories, I had no idea, it's helping me to be more conscious of spending for sure.