After putting money into our joint account from both our salaries for bills, food and petrol, and a non-negotiable amount into longer term savings (currently saving towards a six month emergency fund, we’re about half way there) we split what’s left as follows:
Personal spends
We each keep around 20% of our salaries for clothes, phone bills/subscriptions, going out with friends, hobbies. Husband spends his mainly on vaping, alcohol and woodwork/gardening supplies. He has 1-2 boys nights out in a year, he’s just not in a phase of socialising much.
I see friends loads, a couple of times a week at least, but generally quite cheaply (soft drinks at the pub, going round to people’s houses, hanging in the park with our kids) and am not that interested in clothes or beauty (I cut my own hair etc) so most of my personal money goes on sewing/knitting supplies and books. I do save up for a weekend away with mum & sister each year. I also tend to not take my full 20% and add the rest to savings… husband is the opposite 😂
Kids
We put child benefit and money received from relatives in here and use it to pay for pocket money, kids’ clothes (usually second hand), activities (eg karate DD), misc expenses like a new car seat, and kid-centric outings like softplay. We don’t really do expensive days out as our kids are young and outdoorsy so we just go to country parks, the beach etc for walks and picnics. I never want to refuse a school trip or extra curricular activity because of finances so try to always maintain £500 minimum in this pot.
Family pots
Christmas & birthdays
Self explanatory, hard to cut back on with young kids and a husband who loooooves gift giving.
Holidays
We don’t go abroad, our kids are quite young and very outdoorsy and we love self catering holidays here in Scotland in beautiful natural settings, just chilling out, paddling in the sea/loch, fishing, having barbecues and my husband and I playing cards and having a drink together in the evening. This isn’t that expensive - I’ve priced all inclusive holidays abroad at £3-4K in school holidays, last year we spent £1300 on our week away in Scotland - including good, petrol, accommodation and activities while there. So we try to get away twice and this year we’ve borrowing camping gear and are experimenting with that to get away more. I’m really keen to explore more of our beautiful country and get relaxing time as a family so holidays are important to us - we’ve budgeted about £2.5k this year (for one 5 day break, one 7 day and a couple of camping trips).
Home & garden
We’re both quite handy so like to grow veg and do various garden projects. When we need work done in our house we tend to do it all ourselves which saves money, my husband can do electrics, woodwork, metal work, making some furniture etc and I can sew. We aren’t too fussy about needing to redecorate or change furniture regularly and try to go for simple, classic stuff that doesn’t need changed a lot and buy second hand furniture. But this still ends up an expensive part of the budget because we buy plants etc for the garden.
Other
A catch all pot for eating out/takeaways (extremely rarely done here), charity donations, any misc family expenses not covered in the above.
So to summarise- we don’t prioritise clothes, beauty treatments, big nights out, eating out, new furniture/decorating, expensive day trips. Or technology, we don’t have a laptop or tablet (I use my work laptop if I desperately need to do something on one) and don’t upgrade our phones every time, just if they break.
Some of the things which are important to us - seeing friends, family time together - we invest time in but find ways to do it on not much money, but we do tend to spend on hobbies, garden projects, Christmas/birthdays and holidays.
We spend what we need to on food, petrol and energy. I do cook from scratch and try to reduce waste, I consider myself reasonably thrifty but I don’t take it to the extreme of sitting in a freezing house or skimping on having healthy & tasty meals.