Does this budget seem realistic?

[Tinyfeet26]

Hi, I'm a first time poster, and just wanted some feedback about budgeting.

Myself and my dp we are in the process of buying our first place together, we live in the SE, graduated from university 3 years ago and both currently live with our respective parent, who have generously let us stay at home to save money. We want to get some perspective from others about our outgoings, to see if what we are estimating is realistic.

Our income after tax, pension and student loan deduction is £3183

This is the is the list I have put together of what I think our outgoings would be each month:
Mortgage £1254
Council tax £150
Home and contents insurance £55
Water £20
Internet £25
Gas and electric £130
Tv license £12
Supermarket shopping £240

Car Mot £5
Car insurance £40
Car tax £13
Petrol £80
Car maintenance £20

DP train to work £172
My train to work £100
DP phone £18
My phone £8
My gym membership £20
Contact lenses £20
Charity Direct Debit £6
Total outgoings: £2370

Which would leaves us with with roughly £800 a month, I would then probably want to spilt it, so £400 went in savings, and the rest is used for birthday, christmas, social life and any unexpected household costs.

The place we are buying has a spare room that we could also rent out a room for about £400-500 a month too if we wanted too.

Am I missing off any big costs?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

I always thought life/critical illness insurance cover was a bit of a con, don't they only cover you for certain illnesses and injuries? So if you got ill with the 'wrong" type of illness, you might not be covered? I shall look into it, my bank manager tried to sell it to me about a year ago, and I wasn't interested at the time due to lack of mortgage and cos it seemed rather expensive. But maybe that is something that I need to get.

Why is my water bill so low then? We have a large six bedroom house in the East Midlands and my water is £18 per month.

Life cover is important if you have dependants. Critical illness is not a necessity and does have lots of restrictions.

I looked at critical illness a whole ago and it was a limited list and only paid out after so long with another long list of restrictions... I may reassess if and when we have kids.

However I would want the mortgage paid off/rent paid for a long while for DP if I was suddenly to drop dead.

For some £50 per week free spends is a dream!

£50 pw personal spending money? What planet do some people live on?

We had no spare money at all when we first bought a house so it definitely seems doable!

Have you checked out money saving expert website They have a really comprehensive list for doing budgets.

I hope MNHQ don't mind that I keep recommending MoneySavingExpert but it's really useful for some things. Obviously, there are lots of knowledgable MN'ers but money saving expert is more specialist.

Critical illness covers a list of certain illnesses, some policies cover over 50. Income protection covers your wage for a selected number of years ( usually upto age 70 maximum) if you are off work due to sickness or accident. You select how much you receive each month (upto a certain percent of wages), and how many years you want to be covered for. Very few providers do ip or phi - do not confuse with payment protection or asu which covers for 12 months or 24 months. Very very different policies. You cannot find ip on comparethemeerkat.

I would allow more for car maintenance.

Also how much have you got in savings in case of a big cost, such as needing a new car or boiler?

We will have about £1000-20000 in saving once when we first get the house, as all other money is going on buying the house. As I said before the house has a brand new boiler, so I very much doubt that will break down, and we currently have 2 cars so when/if we sell one we will have some money from that. We should have £400 a month that we can use for big costs and savings. We don't need a car, its more of a luxury, so if we didn't have a car for a bit we could cope perfectly fine, and would save up for one. We won't be moving in straight away as we want to do a bit of decorating so the first few months will be cheaper as we won't have tv license, as much gas, water, electric and food shopping. Also if we rent out our spare room we could easily get £500 a month for it, so that could be used for any big costs as well and build up a nice nest of savings.

I think you could reduce internet and contact lense costs - mine is certainly cheaper than that. It may give you a a few quid extra.