Monthly budget...

[andtellyouofmydreaming]

We are a family of four - me, DH, 3 year old and 7 month old DC. Rent is about £800. So with rent and bills and food and everything else.... How much would people say is a reasonable monthly budget? £0 on childcare. Just wanted to get a bit of perspective ! And prove to DH I'm right!!

At least £2k? I mean bare bones minimum. What are you putting in the budget?
I mean are you including eating out and entertainment? I mean how long is a piece of string and what is your income more Importantly.

It's better to work back from what you're bringing in and working out how much you can afford for x and y

Assuming no debts, I’d say 1k per month for food, petrol and general spending, plus whatever your bills are.

I think rent / mortgage should comfortably be around a third of the budget (less if possible!), so based on that I’d say £2.4k.

Surely it depends what you’re bringing in? You can’t budget more than you have. Also what costs need to come out of it? A daily train journey into London to work or a walk around the corner to work? I’d think less than £2500 a month would be a struggle, though I know people do with less

For us, we can do it on 2k counting in little extras like amazon prime and maybe a night or two out for dinner a month. We dont scrimp on food shopping either (lots of fresh veg and meat). We also have one car. At a push I could budget for 1700 if I really looked at my costs and cut down.

Hard to say. I'd guess £400 a month on food, petrol depends on how much you travel. DH for example travels less than 100 miles a week and I do at least 200-300.

Are you including clothes, entertainment, any memberships?

I'd say £500 per month for food, clothes & entertainment etc.

Then transport, utilities etc will depend on your own circumstances.

I WFH so no travel costs, DP drives to work about 20 mins away. Our rent is £950, council tax £144, BT £50 and then roughly £60 a month gas and electricity. We each put £900 a month so £1800 total into the joint account to cover all of that plus all food shopping and a couple of meals out together and it’s always run out before the end of the month. I’ll also use the joint account if I pick up anything for the house or petrol when I’m out.

We also keep maybe another £1,500 for our own spends and savings separate each month. And we don’t have any children

Travel will be the other big expense - ranging from under 100-400.
Otherwise 2k would be doable - 2.5k would be better.

Thanks everyone, really helpful replies! Hard to get perspective sometimes and I feel sometimes I still work on pre children expenses! Including everything, maybe takeout twice a month, ice cream at beach, new clothes or whatever as children need. But not big spenders on anything. We have £3000 a month and are saving £600 a month, so living on £2400 which seems pretty generous but then everytine there's a big expense (eg car needing mending this month) we don't manage to save all that and wasn't sure whether that was unreasonable.

You need to think a little differently about things like car repairs. They will happen sooner or later so you need to allocate some of your money every month to pay for them.

It can be useful to think of savings in two categories, firstly annual and irregular expenses that don't happen every month, but are hard to avoid, like car repairs/MOT, also Christmas, clothes for DC, a holiday if affordable and important to you, white goods replacement etc. The money you save for this isn't really 'savings' more expenses that haven't yet happened.

Savings, ie money that isn't allocated for anything in particular, but is genuinely spare money that you could use to cover loss of income should be thought of separately, so maybe try having two pots, one to pay for essentials that crop up throughout the year, that you can dip into if you need to and a separate one, that shouldn't really be touched except in dire emergency.

Of course, expectations also vary wildly and make a huge difference to your budget. Eg the average grocery spend for a family your size is probably about £80-100 pw, but there will be people who spend less, either by necesscity, or because they don't see the need to spend any more and there will also be people who spend a lot more and think £2-250 pw for groceries is reasonable, which it is if you can afford it, but equally gives lots of scope to cut back if you need to or want to free up money for other things.

Same for mobile phones. You can get a perfectly decent smartphone and allowance that averages out at around £10 pm, yet many people spend £40/50/60 pm on a high end phone and bigger allowances.

Just go through your statements. Perhaps you’ll find that you need to shop around for utilities or insurance or get too many bits and bobs from a convenience store instead of doing a better supermarket shop. £5 here, £10 there and next thing you know, you could be £200 better off every month.