Overspending every month! Help me!

[friggssake]

We are spending between £100-£500 a month more than we earn...Below is what we have spent roughly this month. Please can you tell me where I am going wrong...? We bring in about £4300 monthly.

Item Cost
Housing 1337.00
Food 670.00
Family pocket money 310.00
Pensions 275.00
Council Tax 183.00
House Insurance 13.50
Gas & Electricity 67.00
Water 57.00
Cars maintenance, tax etc 115.00
Petrol 120.00
Mobile phone 55.00
Cleaning & window cleaning 115.00
Holidays / weekends away 250.00
Children's clubs, swimming etc.. 142.00
Childcare 120.00
Broadband & House Phone 90.00
Exercise classes / gym 90.00
BUPA 65.00
Haircuts 57.00
Adult pocket money 100.00
Christmas Fund 75.00
TV Licence 12.50
Life Assurance 41.50
Clothes (mostly kids) 30.00
Babysitting 30.00
Work lunches 25.00
Gifts 75.00
Car Parking 7.00
Contingency / unexpected extras 75.00
4602.50

Not much to add to above but you need be serious about sorting this out. How are you coping if over spent ever month? Credit card? How much are you paying on repayments? Or have you just used up all savings?

Not proud Lucsy, just want a different way of looking at things, because everything I've done in the last 6 months hasn't made much of an impact.

Believe it or not this is massively useful for me!

I couldn't just say to a mate - 'hey please can you look at my expenditure and see if I could trim things by £300 a month,' - too embarrassing!

Housing 1337.00
Food 400.00
Pensions 275.00
Council Tax 183.00
House Insurance 13.50
Gas & Electricity 67.00
Water 57.00
Cars maintenance, tax 40.00
Petrol 120.00
Mobile phone 10.00
Childcare 120.00
Broadband & House Phone 45.00
Christmas Fund 40.00
TV Licence 12.50
Life Assurance 41.50
Car Parking 7.00

Ive re-jigged your £4602.50 outgoings to what people would normally spend!

£2800 roughly saved you £2000

Yup wise person Akire - we have used all our savings up now.

Similar to the poster above I was going to suggest YNAB. I've recently started using it and it's been an eye opener.

Easest way is to start with essentials and food and work your way down the priority list. So you decide if the kids classes come up over the gym. At some point you will run out of money and you stop spending.

Saying that as has been shown is possible to do everything on list of you cut them back to the best deals and set lower budgets

Have you got cc debt or will you soon have if you've used all of your savings?

I just made a spreadsheet. YNAB... will google...
Pandopos :D

We have a small overdraft which I'm trying to reduce each month...

Ive just saved you £24,000 a year, so you can pay off your overdraft and all get your haircut by Xmas

I'm surprised people are surprised at £57 for hair! I end up spending that just on me, cut and colour once a month, otherwise I'm 95% (from age 30 onwards), so it ends up being one of my priorities despite having a tight budget otherwise.

I include things like presents etc in a list of monthly expenditure, because even if it's isn't all one month, there'd be loads another month that I'd need. But that does seem like a lot.

the water bill also seems very high, but mine is included in rent, so maybe it's not. Your gas and elec seem quite reasonable.

Car tax and insurance can both be paid monthly so aren't just one-off costs, though for me the service/MOT is (so I need to save a bit all the time for those).

I'd be trying to save firstly on food, then on broadband, then on the presents, then cut down on the pocket money extras and the days out/weekends away.

(sorry, 95% grey, that should say, without the cut/colour!)

I dont think £25 a month for work lunches is expensive, given OP will work for 20 days a month that's just over £1 a day, I would struggle to make lunch for £1 a day.

The car costs include insurance ands services yes, MINIM.

Work lunches are cheap because we mostly work at home and rarely need to buy any...

Hair cuts - we grow hair fast in this family! and we use basic hairdressers.

I had no idea my water rates are high - we're on a meter.

Once we have paid off the OD I will look at building up to increasing savings, short and long-term ones.

The YNAB thing looks like it could stop me in my tracks, brilliant. Is it as simple as it looks to use... ?just log incomings and outgoings...

Gas and Electricity: we spend about £40 a month for a household of 5 adults, everyone with own computer and gadgets. How well insulated in the house? Is the heating running longer than it needs too?

Car and fuel costs are high: what potential is there to walk / cycle some of the current trips? Are you urban or rural?

How much of the family spend could be replaced by free or cheap activities, such as walks, community events, museums etc?

I have a similar income to you and we've just done a massive overhaul so we can save money:

• Cancelled the cleaner
• Went onto 'comparethemarket' and changed gas/elec suppliers to the cheapest
• When insurance is due up we go on CTM and go with cheapest
• Switched to Lidl for the bulk of our groceries (saves us £150 per month)
• Changed pet food to supermarket own brand
• Set budgets for meals out, day trips and 'discretionary spending' and keep track of these through the month
• Stopped buying any coffees/teas out from Starbucks, etc
• Make all lunches at home
• Swapped gym membership for running using the Couch to 5k app (free!)
• Groceries are also cheaper as we now make everything from scratch (no prepared veg for example)

We've also gone through our clothes and sold any we no longer want on eBay. We've sold all of our DVDs, CDs and books we no longer want using Ziffit.com.

As it happens though my new budget still includes £75 on gifts...I do find that I spend that much on average....some months more, some months less.

ignoring the obvious pissing-up-against-a-wall with £75 for an ironing board and pet food (is it an elephant?), nearly a grand a year on tatmas fund, huge amounts on gifts (stop that RIGHT NOW, NO presents for adults)...

that massive water bill hit me too. What are you doing to use that much?

broadband bill is colossal. Going rate for new customers with unlimited broadband and unlimited landline calls is about £25 including line rental. You change every year to keep that - but even if you don't, who charges £90?

car tax - hope you aren't paying monthly, in one go is cheaper. Annual service should cost about £100 if that. What's going on?

how much kid pocket money? wow!

and so on.

how many are you and what ages?

are you wasting food/buying ready meals/drinking loads?

on the bright side, there's loads of scope here.

Special my car is serviced by a dealership and it's a lot more than £100 a year, I do get certain benefits with that though which I recognise I pay for by way of getting it serviced there - these benefits are additional warranty and no questions asked free breakdown cover for the whole of Europe.

We have pretty much exactly the same income as you OP and presently save at least £1500 monthly. But we used to over spend too.

We cut:
Clothes buying (except dire need, then eBay)
No holidays
Batch cook with mince dishes, soup and home made bread etc
Told family/friends we were having to economise so gifts would be smaller.
Let cleaner/mothers help go.
Cut bupa.
Explained to children that dad doesn't earn enough money for us to buy everything they would like.

We keep meticulous accounts of every penny spent and move spare cash into a separate account.

Ironing board and cover total £16 at Robert dyas. Probably less at Argos but I can't get on to their site.

I am a frugal type - did you guess, lol - and I found a few months of looking at stuff in detail was enough to set a sensible budget.
I am always surprised when people say "you could easily spend X on so and so"- yes, you could easily do that, it's not hard? But if you want to save and you are on a good income with some clear overspending like here, then you cut back.

Ps given how much you're spending, if you want to keep the bupa you probably could.

those 'benefits' may well be available much cheaper if bought elsewhere (Assuming that you use them - how often are you in Europe?)..

a dealership is no more guaranteed to be competent/honest than Joe round the corner, although they ARE guaranteed to be more expensive. Find out what they actually do - a lot of 'servicing' is actually just 'checking' which anyone can do.

If you can run a spreadsheet you don't need to pay for budgeting software. Another saving. :-)

What on earth is family/adult pocket money?

Are you giving pocket money to the whole street?