Can I live on £350.00 a month (after bills, food and childcare)?

[Lorddenning1]

• [NB: Title edited by MNHQ at OP's request to add text in brackets]

I am panicking a little bit as come April, my financial situation will change and i dont know if I can manage. bit of a back story, me and my partner work full time and have 2 kids, we pay £230.00 a week on childcare.
I have come back to work recently after having DS2, so at the moment i am not paying tax, as i am under the personal tax allowance, this will change in April. Also i claim tax credit and this years award is based on me receiving Maternity pay, so my income in quite low.
In April I will start to pay Tax again and my tax credits will go down, so I will be £280.00 a month worse off. So my question, after bills, Credit card/loan, childcare, Food and Petrol I will have around £350.00 a month to live on, this will be for birthdays, clothes, beavers, school trips, dentist etc, basically everything else, is it possible to live on. This will be my finacial for the next 3 years (until little one goes to school and i pay off a big loan, which all happens at the same time).

Is that £350 for both you and your partner or just for you?

How do I ask MN to change a title?

I think you report your own op.

I think it will be tight op. Pp saying it's 'fun money' must have missed the bit where it has to pay for school uniforms and dentists. I think it's perfectly sensible to plan for a reduction in your income.

I would bet that there's quite a lot of stuff you haven't factored into that £350 and it's not all 'fun money'. Have you considered putting money by each month for things like car MOT/Tax/Servicing or yearly bills such as TV licence, House Insurance, Car Insurance, any professional subscriptions (I'm an accountant and got caught out by my £300 bill to remain an accountant this year)? Then there's things like hair cuts, dentist, prescriptions, opticians etc. I've been putting off going to the opticians because I always end up needing new glasses and spending in excess of £200 (I have an eye problem). I'd definitely make sure you pick out everything you need to spend on as that £350 will disappear fast.

" Pp saying it's 'fun money' "

well now we know it includes stuff like MOT it's a bit different.

Rip it up and start again, as the song says

Surely you'd be better to factor in things like snack money & saving for an MOT into your monthly budget? To me these are regular monthly 'outgoings' (the MOT money goes in a tin for example), rather than saying you've paid the basics then still need x y & z?

I don’t get the bashing either... £350 a month when you have kids who need clothes and shoes etc is not that much. Never mind the car needing repairs etc. I would really struggle. Yes, people live on less but that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant

I have about 10 different bank accounts at the moment where I put an amount in each every month and try and only use that money for it's purpose. So for example I started this in November and put the same amounts in for activities, clothes, birthdays and decorating however as I have spent money from each pot for that only purpose I now have left- £49.00 activities, £69.00 clothes, £29.00 birthdays and £10.00 decorating. I have other accounts for electricals, car and holidays etc.i just find psychologically it works quite well.

There's an app called YNAB which is fab. It's like the above bank accounts but on one app. You allocate money to different pits and plan to save all your for things like car expenses and xmas.

We transfer money each month into a savings account and I have a spreadsheet to show what belongs in which catagory. So for yearly bills we save up each month for them so they don’t surprise us.

Inevitably get something that appears though...

It sounds like you’re doing quite a lot of money saving tips anyway, such as charity shops. I adopt a ‘one in one out’ policy on buying things that are not absolutely necessary. So I sell stuff I no longer use on eBay and only if there’s money in my paypal will I then buy extras like clothes, presents for my daughter (I make all her clothes but I appreciate most people can’t/don’t have time to do that). I do surprisingly well out of that and it also helps you keep on top of clutter in your house. Might seem an obvious tip but it works.

I do like the idea of seperate pots for things, i think i may transfer £150.00 into an account for things like car repairs, dentist etc unexpected bills and use the £200 (£50.00 per week for anything else, for example, Beavers is £3.00, slimming world is £4.95, this week, its my brother in law and my sisters birthday this weekend, snack money is due on Monday and i owe the window cleaner £10, so that will prob mean all my money for this week is gone, we dont get take aways or things because we cant afford them. we both work hard so its hard sometimes to feel like we dont get the rewards. we rent and have no savings. we need a new car but cant afford to buy one, we could borrow the money but cant afford to it back with the high APR :(
The money is between us both.

@Rumpledfaceskin I like this idea, people keep telling me to go on eBay, u currently sell things on the local Facebook groups etc

I currently*

That too, although I’ve never used Facebook to sell as I can’t face the interaction and having people round to collect stuff. It really depends what you're selling. eBay is good as you often get buyers looking for that particular niche thing who are more likely to pay a bit more even with the fees, sometimes a really surprising amount for stuff I was considering chucking!

Have you told the Tax Credits office that you have gone back to work??

You may find that you have been overpaid Tax Credits

@Rumpledfaceskin how do you get on sorting out posting and packaging etc, how do u work out the cost and where do you buy the packaging stuff, that's the only thing that puts me off doing it.

well normally tax credits are always based on last years income but if your income is going down you can ask them to base it on the current financial year, so my tax credits now are based on this years pay (which includes maternity pay)
In april i will contact them again and tell them that my yearly income will be going back up, so my tax credits will go down (which rightly so) I just wish i wasnt paying £930 a month on childcare :(

It will get easier OP, life has its ups and downs and the early childcare years are definitely some of the hardest financially. I'm currently on an 'up', but I start mat leave with baby no.2 (no1 is 7yo) in 6 weeks so I'll shortly be back to high childcare bills or low income. I sell all our unwanted things on facebook/ebay and it's amazing what cash you can bring in from it. I recently paid for a weekend trip to LEGOLAND with the money I'd saved from selling off things we don't need any more.

@SleepySheepy thanks for the reassurance, we were the same, we were fine until we had baby number 2, he is one now and our other is 7, we are defo not having any more. I know it's going to be hard and the fact it will last for the next 3 years is also playing on my mind, but we must soldier on :)

Our little one keeps asking us about Legoland, we are in the north so it would cost a bit to go :(

Basically most things are just a small parcel which is about £3. I always use Royal Mail and if something is really big or heavy you can check on the website. Buyer nearly always pays the postage costs (unless I’m selling something for a buy it now price in which case I sometimes offer free postage). I just buy a pack of 500 grey postage bags off amazon for about £5 to wrap things but you can use anything (old boxes or plastic bags). PayPal makes it easy to see the buyers address and everything. I put it off for soooo long as I thought it sounded like a faff but the money I make is so worth it I wish I’d started sooner.

Don't waste your money on Lego Land. It's absolutely shit. Seriously overpriced shit at that.

Well that was a bit off topic. We had a great time and really enjoyed our time there/together but each to their own...

Legoland is great - we got in cheap with Tesco vouchers