Family budget help - failing miserably

[Tryingtobudget]

Namechanged for obvious reasons.

Family of 2 adults, 4 children and 1 cat. Monthly income of £3620 after tax

Outgoings:

Rent: £800 (includes water)
Electic: On a meter, roughly £30 a week but not sure as just top up as and when. Cannot change to DD as landlord put the meter in before we moved here
Diesel: £120 a month roughly. Again don't really keep track as we both top up as and when
Council tax: We don't pay by DD as DP paid it off all in one go when we got the bill. Will be paying by DD next time
Internet: £26 a month
Mobiles: £150 a month for 3 phones
Car insurance: Paid in one go so no DD
Car tax: £18 a month
Debt: £360 a month
Food: No idea. We don't really do a weekly or monthly shop. Just buy day to day depending on what time people will be home/what kids have after school/school lunches/if we are eating out
Cat: About £20 for food, pet insurance

I've just gone through the bank statements and realised we don't have contents insurance

Debt: Loan of 10k, credit card 2k

Savings: about 13k split between an ISA and a savings account.

I know we could use all the savings to pay off the debt but ideally we would like to keep them for a house deposit.

I know we are terrible with money. Everybody just seems to buy what they fancy without really thinking about it. DP and I have just sat down to budget but where do you start? Realistically I don't know about meal planning or food budgeting, i've always been terrible at it and its easy to just go day by day. Bank statement is full of £20 shops at the co-op or Budgens. Inevitably we end up picking up crap along with each shop which pushes the bill up.

Where do you start? Is it unrealistic to think we could put £500 away in the savings each month?

Yes! My dh has pre payment card for prescriptions...saves a lot.
Amazon pantry do s good deal where you can bulk buy groceries/toiletries fur a one off del charge of £2.99
Maybe worth it for you if you have pets?

I think you're an ideal candidate for www.youneedabudget.com. It's an envelope budgeting tool with a huge and active forum so you can get to grips with your finances. They give a 34 day free trial so you can see if you like it. They used to sell it as a standalone programme but have, this month, switched to an online subscription format.

The basic idea is that you have virtual envelopes for each expense that you put money into. That way, you can see where your holes are, what you're spending masses on, etc. You can decide to save r for 5 or 6 different things....it's totally flexible.

Lots of people find the ynab software very helpful but I must admit I fu d it a bit confusing....maybe it's my age though

I cant for the life of me work it either.

It must be my age as well.

YNAB is great ,its totally changed my spending/budgetting and helped me get out of debt snd stay out. , but also why not and come and join us in the Frugaleers thread?. We are a friendly bunch and you'll get lots of ongoing support there

As laska says, we are lovely and it's really helped me being in the frugaleers!

Will reply properly later, just had a huge discussion with DP about money and budgeting. Trying to get my head around food planning etc, re-reading old batch cooking threads. Will head over to the frugaleers later!

Thank you all for your tips and advice

I need to start batch cooking. Even if it's just a few lasagnes, chillis and currys for nights when we're feeling lazy. We tend to eat fresh veg or salad with chicken/steak/fish every night. But it's the nights we can't be arsed that cost us £20/30 a go on pizza or Chinese twice a week. One day in the kitchen to save £50ish a week seems a good trade.

We changed all our bulbs to low power ones, even the downlights. I've accepted that I can't use the tumble dryer for hours at a time and have started using the clothes airer again and putting bits in for 15mins to finish/soften. Electric bill was through the roof last statement. I always use the dishwasher on Eco and I stopped stacking it so much. Thinking I was being good by getting as much in there meant some things weren't getting cleaned properly.

I use Costco and split the meat packs up for the freezer and buy large sides of salmon/fish to split up into decent portions. Once in the discipline of taking things out of the freezer every morning it makes life much easier. I swapped £8 each m&s steaks for the asda thin minute steaks. The flavoured ones are quite tasty (def not a decent substitute for a dry aged sirloin though).

My next goal is a slow cooker to start using slightly cheaper cuts of meat for stewing and using tinned things and veggies to bulk out a bit.

Some of the ideas on this are very good. Thanks for sharing!

this is exactly why this kind of 'audit' is so worthwhile - well done!

you can see where you are wasting money; takeaways, coffees, books (use a library) and so on. Those monster mobile bills need attention when you can.

food: got a freezer? Batch cooking. Chilli, curries, stews, spag bol etc etc.

paying insurance and car tax in one chunk is the smart way to do it, otherwise it costs more. At the end of each year shop around for insurance, renewing with the same company is for suckers. Ditto electricity (you can shop around even with a meter) and broadband/landline.

heating oil - NEVER use a direct debit, especially at the moment with falling prices. Keep an eye on prices and tank up when it is cheap.

(for all these things, if you need to spread the cost then save up each month to keep you on track)

check interest rates on your savings; most accounts pay bog-all. Look at the interest paying current accounts which will keep you ahead of inflation. The ISA will be especially pitiful.

and of course the big thing is to kill those debts.

You might be able to switch to Direct Debit for your electricity, see MSE.

Look at Kindle unlimited. I don't have it as I don't spend anywhere near enough on books a month but my understanding is you pay a fixed sum every month and then you can download all the books you want. I can't remember how much the fixed sum is but it certainly is much less than £60!

In my experience the selection of books available on Kindle Unlimited is crap.

You would be better off registering your wish list on www.ereaderiq.co.uk and it tells you when the books fall below a trigger price that you set - eg 99p.

I rarely pay more than this and this includes best sellers by famous authors.

What age are your children?

One stumbling block I've noticed for people who have difficulty planning / controlling food costs is that they start with the mindset they must provide gourmet meals and do "recipes" with multiple ingredients.

I would suggest you start VERY simply and just make it a family pact that the next, say, 90 days of meals were going to be very simple and repetitive. Make it a family project; let the kids know why. You first eat up what you have on hand even if the meals are strange or if not everyone has the same meal. Freezer, canned goods, etc. - use it up instead of shopping for more. If you can't bring yourself to eat older goods in fridge, pantry, and freezer, get rid of them. (Expiry dates btw are not ironclad; they dont' mean the food's gone bad once their past.) Start with clean, fresh storage areas.

Then come up with a list of easy breakfast and lunch items everyone can handle, and 7-10 dinners. The latter can include things like scrambled eggs, canned soups, chef's salads, hamburgers with sides of frozen steamed veggies, sandwiches, maybe a frozen lasagna. Just keep it simple while you get a handle on it. Don't try to launch right in making crockpot meals or other things with a large learning curve till you get good at planning. You need to just get going so that you aren't doing takeaway or dining out so often.

I think you'd benefit from you and DP keeping a detailed spending diary for a month to try and work out how much is being spent in all those little shops.

We meal plan simple meals and only buy what we need food wise, current budget is £400.00 per month for 2 adults/2 teenage DD's

i'd also suggest getting onto the Debt Freee wanaabe section of moneysavingexpert.com and filling in your SOA - you need to get a much better picture of where the moneys going at present before you can really move forward and 1 sort your debt out and 2 save for a house, we save about your target each month on a similar budget to you

books can come from a real library. Or if you get something that is compatible with epub, you can borrow ebooks from a real library.

more to life than Amazon!!

Re meal planning and batch cooking, write down the stuff you like to eat.

Then try to plan it so that you don't eat chicken 2 nights running.

I do an online food order to be collected (free) every Friday morning, I top up any fresh fruit/veg on Tuesday.

So my meal plan has anything that requires fresh food on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. I have "store cupboard" meals such as tuna pasta bake.

I use frozen veg to make slow cooker jambalaya/curry so peppers, onions, green beans etc. I also use a food processor to grate carrot etc for batch cooking chilli/spag bol sauce (Annabel Karmel recipe)

I make a generic tomato sauce in the slow cooker for pasta, pizza, meatballs. Firstly do it in a pan with 1 tin chopped toms, onions, peppers and when you get it right then you can make a bigger batch.

FREEZING tips - we buy stuff in bulk from Costco. So mince is portioned into 450g ish, put it into large (gallon) ziplock freezer bag and rolling pin it flat. It will defrost much faster this way than if you freeze it in a block.

I also freeze chilli etc this way, flat in a gallon ziplock.

Separate out items, so chicken breasts are frozen in a ziplock quart bag, 2 to a bag. Seal it then push one chicken breast to the top of the bag and one at the bottom. They defrost quicker as individual breasts rather than 2 stuck together. Same for salmon fillets.

Hope this helps.

Amazing thread, so helpful! I'm off to write my favourite tips down.

Resourceful Cook website brilliant for meal planning with shopping lists that click straight through to eg Tesco or Sainsbury online (or you can print them). All costed and sorted by level of store cupboard. I love it when I can't think what to cook.

meal planning is definitely the way to go. We started doing this a couple of years ago and it makes a massive difference.So, if I do an internet shop on a saturday to be delivered on sunday, then I need 7 evening meals. Sunday is a roast....can get a large chicken for less than a fiver, then look at which veg are on the 69p offer ( I use Tesco ). Monday....sausage egg and chips...tuesday...fish pie.....and so on. Then I add anything for the kids lunches.....loo rolls....etc. Washing liquid/powder.....whatever is on offer.I may also buy tesco value washing liquid and mix them together. I can do a weeks shopping for £55 for 4 of us,me,DH, DS 17 and DD 12 and I don't scrimp. Before I did meal planing I would buy stuff randomly that I fancied...then end up having to go shopping again because I couldn't make a decent meal out of any of it!

And every now and then we have a pick and mix tea....using up the bits out of the freezer.So we may end up with 2 fish fingers and 3 chicken nuggets each but it's a meal and the kids love it!

Take a small set amount of cash out at the beginning of the week to spend on mags, birthday cards, coffees and other odds and sods. When it's gone it's gone, but at least you feel like you've had a bit of spending money.

And yes, meal plan and shop online.

Price compare your utilities, insurances etc.

I'm currently tracking what we're spending from our joint account (used for bills and joint spends) and it's making me think twice before spending anything.