Setting ourselves a challenge this month

[Meggiebean]

Every month we overspend meaning that we end up skint before payday. This month we are setting ourselves a challenge!

we have transferred £900 into my Monzo account and this is our money to live off until 25th September. This has to cover -

food
petrol (120)
fun stuff

if we can do this then we might actually have some money left to save!

is anyone else on a similar budget?

How many people is this for? If I had £900 for a month it wouldn’t even be a budget, I wouldn’t come near spending this amount for two adults and EOW step kids.

How much is your food budget and how much is your fun budget?

What I'd do is make 4 Monzo pots:

Petrol 120
Food (let's say 400 but depends on the size of your family etc)
Fun 150
Buffer 230 (to give you some flex as you're just starting out budgeting, but aim to save that and not spend it - you could put some more in to fun if you like tho but I wouldn't put the whole lot).

Then you can properly monitor your spending. If you treat it as one lump sum you'll still run out of money because you're not actually budgeting, you're just spending randomly from a different account for that month.

In my household there is me, 1 high school age child, no pets. For those categories if I allocated £900 (I don't) it would look like this:

Petrol £50
Food £250
Fun £200 (includes my fun spending as well as family fun)
Buffer £400 (which I would save rather than keep in this budget!)

I've budgeted those amounts for a very long time so I know it works for us.