Please, look at my budget. What, if anything, can I do?

[SeraphinaR]

NC.

Been going through my monthly budget and things aren't looking great.

Mortgage, Ins, Maintenance, etc. £1071

Electric, Gas, Water, Council Tax £278

Cars £96

TV, Broadband and Phones £100

Total is £1545

Then there's

Food £500
Fuel £250
Nursery Fees are either £292 or £363

All together that's £2658 using the highest Nursery fees figure, without any savings for Birthdays, Christmases, Clothing, Emegencies, etc.

Our joint income is £2600. Occasionally DH might earn slightly more if he gets a small efficiency related bonus but it can't be relied upon but some months it would seem we may be -58 short if DH makes no bonus and we have the higher month of Nursery fees.

I'm going to look into a second job. It isn't a route I wanted to go down but things just aren't comfortable as it is.

Any suggestions?

We budget £100 a week for food, household essentials, nappies (for2) and toiletries but we write a food plan every week and try and claw back on savings each week! We use Tesco club card points and multi deals so stock up on nappies for the month if they are on offer one week. We regularly manage to knock £20-£30 off our weekly budget. We also use the handheld scanner when we go round the shop so we can see if we are getting carried away and take things back out.

Sorry that's for family of 4

Marriage tax allowance
Giff Gaff for phones
Amazon Family for nappies, pet food, cleaning products etc. - you pay an initial fee but save between 5 and 20% when you set up Subscribe and Save.

I think that the only way you'll make a significant difference is to go for a full time job with anti social hours. Something like 1pm -9pm

Use childcare for afternoons at £26 a day, you're childcare bill would be higher but the money earned would cover it and you'd have more income after childcare bills are paid.

Somewhere like ALDI or Lidl are good for anti social hours and good base rate pay.

Obviously a big sacrifice to family life.

Alternatively yours and your partners salary needs to increase for same/similar roles and work hours and that may be more difficult to achieve.

Get rid of Netflix, not meaning to sound mean but if your figures are in the minus then you can’t actually afford it.
Also as you said your food shop is v v high. Meal plan for a week and only buy what you need. I just spent 72 for a family of four and I consider that an expensive week as I had to replenish some things like pasta and lunch snacks for the dc.

Also check out your electric and gas tariffs, switch to LED bulbs if you can (or haven’t already)over the next few months.

Hopefully some of this will help, firstly start with your biggest expenses to save money:

1. mortgage check to see if you are on a fixed or standard variable rate. If you have gone off the special deal then speak to a mortgage broker, they will not charge for the first meeting. This could save you over £100 a month.
2. food shopping if you want to save money then again this can be reduced by £150 a month with relative ease. Analyse your spending habits, do a meal plan and stick to it like glue, if you have to put sticky labels on stuff in the fridge then do it, give the teenagers £20 between them for the weekend when they get there to go and buy their own snacks. If you cannot be trusted in a supermarket (I cannot) then do online shopping, we bulkbuy once a month at costco and then top up at ocado (£40 a week ish) we eat very well on this.
3. tax free childcare - check if you are eligible.
4. direct debits, you gas and electric look pretty low but worth a check to make sure they are the best deals and obviously phone contracts when they come up on the lowest sim only deals.
5. the old mantra of work smarter not harder. If your husband is a mechanic by trade he would earn good money working at a garage. He would also earn good money servicing local peoples cars in an evening or at weekends. In your current situation working at the same time seems counter productive so if your husband doesn't want to go down the route of working on cars in his spare time it would make far more sense for you to work evenings and weekends as you would be instantly £292 a month better off minimum.

Also to think about seriously how often do you need to take everyone out in the same car together? If it is once or twice a month it would make more sense for him to have a cheap economical run about and take two cars on the odd occasion it is needed rather than him running a diesel guzzler daily.

If you really want to save money you could do all the above fairly easily but a lot depends on how much you need to and how much you want to. You are in a situation where you can survive on your current lifestyle or you can take some harder choices and have £700 a month additional income.

It also looks like you can transfer some of your nil rate tax band to your husband as you are well under 12k a year.

www.gov.uk/apply-marriage-allowance

This would be a quick savings and if applicable you can also reclaim last years

Sorry for my previous posts op, I missed where you'd said about thinking you'd missed the opportunity for tax-free childcare. it might be a faff to set up but then it's easy to use and it's just money you can use for nursery and holiday club etc when they're in school.

If work want you there 3 days, and that would bring in an extra 350/month, and nursery would cost an extra 200 or 250/month (4 and 5 week months are what I'm assuming changes your nursery costs), the extra petrol would be less than the 100-150 per month that would bring in?

Sort out that plus the tax free childcare, try and cut back on the shopping. DH moves to a SIM only deal at the end of the year. I think those together should give you the deficit you are looking at, and give you a little extra to put into the things that have already been mentioned and aren't currently being budgeted for.

As soon as your DHs contract is finished get out of it and onto a £190 pcm tesco deal: you even get a family perk bonus if you are both with the same company.

You can cut quite a bit off the £500. It is really hard to be thrifty every day but be (v) thrifty foodwise 3 days out of 7 and bank any savings regularly or even just put in a jar. Don't let it get frittered. Then at the end of each month pay off the overdraft so you start with a clean slate.

Inexpensive meals to fill up teens: eggs in all forms. Baked beans; bread, baked potatoes, cheese. Pasta etc. Teens will eat 3x the calories they need, given half the chance, so once their nutritional needs are met let them fill up on inexpensive carbs.

You can still enjoy less expensive foods, just make a game out of being crafty: buy seasonal etc, rather than relying on the cheapest shop where it may not be the best value.

You can lose netflix straight away.

If you can cut your grocery shop by 10% and lose netflix you are breaking even. Anything beyond that you should save for emergencies/treats. Get in the habit of sweeping month end monies into a second account so you don't use it unless you actually mean to.

that should be a £10 pcm deal. fat fingers!

It's the food budget you have to cut back on then. Something has to go, and you can't cut back anywhere else, so it has to be that.

Stop buying all branded labels, and buy supermarket own brands, with one or tw exceptions. Switch supermarkets - do your main shop and Aldi or Lidl and top-ups from Asda in between. If you are getting the shopping delivered then you are missing out on bargains you would see if you were in the shop. Check the price per kilo of everything. Meal plans are all very well, but if you go shopping and find a perfectly good bag of carrots reduced to 9p then have that instead of the other veg that was on your shopping list. Get cheap fruit at the end of the day and make crumbles and fruit puddings.
Get creative with herbs and spices.

If your car is cheaper on fuel than his diesel 7-seater, he should be using that instead to cut down the overall petrol bill

You need to look at every single item you spend money on - thinking of a food bill as one thing doesn't help - you've got to look at exactly what you're buying and why.

Seriously - do the MSE full spending review on the Debt Free Wannabe forum that PP mentioned - it will help you break down all your spending, then if you save a few quid here and a few quid there, it all adds up.

I've got a massive spreadsheet where I log all my little savings, even down to changing to a cheaper brand of tea bags. This year, I'm on track to use all those little savings added together to pay an extra £5k off my morgage

And, if you get a job at Tesco, once you start getting the staff discount, you can cut your food bills even more

This is a deliciously frustrating thread...

Props to OP for finding a reason to negate nearly every helpful suggestion given 🤣

Is that 45 miles to work or 45 miles round trip?
Presuming that £50 of the budget is for insurance and tax.
If the budget is £250 and you are taking £50 for your short journeys and 2 days per week travelling, whereas he's travelling much further and everyday you may find that his car isn't necessarily inefficient, especially if he's servicing it regularly.

If he's spending £150 on fuel, presuming national average of 135.47ppg for diesel today, he's using 110.7 litres of fuel, which is 24 gallons. He must be getting upwards of 45mpg. Pretty good for a 7 seater.

@Whirlaway thank you and I'm sorry! I mean, obviously, some suggestions, though good and helpful, aren't going to be practical for our circumstances, and I explained why but I have been able to take quite a few helpful suggestions from this thread and I've got a few ideas now with ways to cut back and save!

@notatwork so its 45 mile round trip. DH says he gets 33mpg and he always fuels up at the cheapest station locally. The £200 does him fuel for a month. He does 1200 miles a month roughly. I put £60 in my car at the beginning of last month and I've got just above 1/4 of a tank left.

Seraphina is there a reason you can't have the cheaper package Netflix? You haven't said why you can't.

Give us some examples of what brands you eat?

Beans for example. The ASDA 25p tins are as good as the big brands (Aldi ones are minging). Try using cheaper alternatives and don't tell your DH or DCs and see if they notice. If not or they prefer it then switch brands

I think I would resent working unsocial hours and counting every penny, if my husband refused to exchange his gas guzzling car for something cheaper to run.

We had a 7 seater at one point because we had 4 DC at home but the amount of times we used all the seats was minimal. I don't think it's worth keeping when the tennis don't live with you ft. Even in my house where all our kids were home ft, mostly the terms didn't want to come out with us anyway! The older DC get, the more you do separate activities with them.

Tennis? Teens!

Yes quite a lot of good suggestions on here, OP.

Hope you get to make some savings/additional income!

@hmsvictory when I originally took Netflix out and cost wasnt as much of an issue, I did the slightly more expensive one so the kids could watch in their rooms or on their phones. But I dont think they do and as they arent with us full time i might as well at least downgrade it now to the cheaper Netflix.
I eat a lot of cheaper brands anyway. Dh says the genuine brands are a rip off. All my jars of sauces, kormas, carbonaras, bolognaise etc. Are aldi or asda own brand. Cereal is all aldi brand. I've got some lidl yoghurt in the fridge for DD. Cheese is also either asda, lidl or aldi Brand. Things I still buy genuine are aunt bessies roast Potatoes, chips, birdseye chicken. Lurpak butter. Sunpat peanut butter. Frozen veg is all asda or aldi brand. Also spend a large amount on fizzy drink which I know for definite I need to scrap. Also dont buy cheap snacks. Genuine branded crisps, butterkist popcorn, chocolate is what we fancy but it's usually Cadbury, Nestle, etc. Not the cheaper equivalents. So I've definitely got room to work on there!

Have you tried applying for universal credit? You may get something as you have childcare to pay for, so they may help with that. Try entitled to.

Things I still buy genuine are
aunt bessies roast Potatoes =STOP! Just buy potatoes and chop them yourself!
chips= same as above!
Birdseye chicken= why not just chicken breast
Frozen veg is all asda or aldi brand= why not buy fresh you get more for your money, frozen veg is notoriously less value per kg Also spend a large amount on fizzy drink which I know for definite I need to scrap= AGREE!!
Also dont buy cheap snacks. Genuine branded crisps, butterkist popcorn, chocolate is what we fancy but it's usually Cadbury, Nestle,= none of that is necessary to live!! A treat here and there yes but not as part of the weekly shopping!