Living standards for a family of 4 on £75k a year

[Onfire]

I know there’s so many variables due to expenditure but based on a family of 4 running 2 cars, one paid for, one that’s £200 a month, no other loans, no childcare, a mortgage of £1100 how would you expect to live?

It’s 2 people earning so the total amount coming in per month is around £4600 after tax and deductions.

I ask because it seems like a lot, but yet it doesn’t seem to stretch very far. We do manage to save a little bit but most of the time this is maybe a role £200 a month here and there.

DH is in need of replacing the paid for car, it’s not worth a huge amount as it’s getting old and ropey but I’d be worried about borrowing money

Just over 40 per person per week for food with a healthy diet , rowntree foundation would be around 700 per month family of 4 healthy

The only way you’re going to work out where your money is going is to either comb through your bank statements and add it all up, or use an app that does it for you. Your bills all sound fairly reasonable (large mortgage but not out of proportion with your salary) and you don’t pay for childcare. So the problem is clearly in your day to say spending on other things

We had an income above that when I was married and it all seemed to go!

I made a spread sheet which was an eye opener, over £1000 a month on supermarket trips! £800 on meals out/takeaways, trips at weekends regularly etc. Write a spreadsheet of your expenses in June (before schools finished) and be brutally honest, see where it goes and then you can see where savings can be found. I now spend half that with dp

I find the perfect way to deal with gratuitous spending is to have my weekly out of pocket allowance in cash. When you see your purse emptying or think "gosh if I spend £6.75 in Starbucks I'll only have £12 left for four days" it's much easier to think twice.

I understand OP. It's frightening how it fritters away. We don't even eat out that much, no lunches, no coffees and it still disappears.

Do you have separate account for everyday spending and food shopping?

We use one card / account for all everyday spends and put X amount of money into it.

Helps us budget much better.

@PostMenWithACat

I find the perfect way to deal with gratuitous spending is to have my weekly out of pocket allowance in cash. When you see your purse emptying or think "gosh if I spend £6.75 in Starbucks I'll only have £12 left for four days" it's much easier to think twice.

Or these days, transfer the money to an account with a debit card, but no overdraft, so when the money runs out, you can't spend any more without deliberately transferring more money or applying for an overdraft. I think the Starling account works like this. It also categorises your spending so you can see what you've spent on.

On the matter of food and a healthy diet, it could well be that £300 is all they're spending, or it could be far more than that. Only the OP will know, but it's perfectly possible to eat a healthy diet on that amount of money, and it's certainly not necessary to spend £700 pm.

You can spend wildly different amounts on similar food that offers very similar nutritional benefits and makes similar meals.

Like my previous example of standard supermarket broccoli at £1.30 a kilo or sprouting broccoli at £10 a kilo, basic porridge oats at £1 a kilo, or Oats so simple sachets at £10 a kilo, frozen salmon at £8 a kilo or fancy fresh stuff at £28 a kilo etc etc etc.

The OP is in a similar situation to most people. Sufficient income to cover the basics with some left over, but it's not enough to spend freely on everything the family could ever want. But there's a lot of tricks that can be used to make money go far further, to get the same things for a lot less money, that provides significant more wriggle room in the monthly budget.

As PP have said you need to budget for everything. Pre kids, we had a joint income of 60,000, a mortgage of 700 and somehow always spent up. We had a run of big bills (boiler, bed, oven, washing machine all went within 2 months) and ended up using credit cards.

We sat down and worked out everything we spent over the year. Set budgets for birthdays, holidays, clothes etc and divided it by 12, which was our minimum monthly contribution to annual costs. We then worked out the cost to replace everything we owned, and divided it by the number of years it should last - and then by 12 to give the minimum monthly contribution to replacement costs. These went into our budget spreadsheet.

With the left over, we each got an amount of money we did not have to account for that went into separate accounts. That money had to cover all incidentals - drinks with friends, petrol and parking for fun trips, take aways. We then went through the joint bank account every month and assigned everything against the budget. We found a couple of random direct debits doing that.

We went from nothing at the end of the month to 3,000 savings in 4 months. The trick is to be generous with personal budgets and really strict about sticking to them.

We now have a similar take home to you, though slightly higher costs (300 a month in childcare, 450 car) and have about 800 minimum going into savings monthly with generous spending on food and personal stuff.

@BarbaraofSeville - I have two adult DC and even if I allowed £400pcm for food I don't think I could manage it. Partly because I work full-time, partly because In Covid times it has been breakfast, lunch and dinner due to wfh, partly because we never have a takeaway. If I had time to go to Aldi, Sainsbury and Savers, I'm sure I could save £25pw but my time is worth more than that.

Including toiletries and cleaning stuff, and a few beers, bottle of gin, etc, I am hard pressed to keep supermarket shopping under £200pw. With more time and less money, I reckon I could do it for £150 but I don't have to.

£200pw on food is crazy, what do you buy?

Milk
Bread
Butter
Juice
Crackers
Cheese
Ham
Salami
Salad stuff
Garlic bread
Pasta
Vegetables
Salmon fillets
Eggs
Bacon
Creme fraiche
Tonic
Fizzy water
18 beers
Coffee
Cereal
Yoghurt
A pudding
Fruit
Chicken
Sausage meat
Cranberry sauce
Poultry gravy
Mince
Tins Toms
Lazy garlic
Olives
Lamb chops
Cous cous
Coriander
Gammon steaks
Oven chips
Cpl steaks
Noodles
Stir fry veg
Puff pastry
Cherry Toms
Pesto
Mozzarella
Persil
Bleach
Bog roll
Cat food
Bin bags
Pitta bread
Houmous
Tsatziki
Shower gel
Shampoo
Toothpaste
Mouthwash
And there will be top ups
I am not making excuses for eating well and using ingredients that help me put a dinner together quickly when I have worked a ten hour day.

pissinthepotty I think the point was I didn’t ask you any questions- you replied to the wrong person and quoted my post which had no relevance to your point on mobile phones and childcare!

£40 per person per week - where has that figure come from?

^Persil
Bleach
Bog roll
Bin bags
Shower gel
Shampoo
Toothpaste
Mouthwash^

But you don't need to buy those things every week, far from it and the cost is minimal, certainly a trivial percentage of £200 PW.

I don't count gin, tonic and beer as essential food shopping either. Obviously you could buy it in the supermarket as part of your normal weekly shop, but you wouldn't include it when illustrating a point of 'this is basic essential groceries that I struggle to keep under a budget of £200 pw for'.

Hi OP

You refer to your budget amd spreadsheet but I’m not getting the impression that you are actually tracking your household spending. That’s the other side of the system - a budget that isn’t tracked and checked isn’t doing it’s job.

Someone above recommended YNAB, which is good. Right now though, you can download a couple of months if bank statements and track your spending against the categories in your budget. So you can see where every penny is going.

Knowledge is power m.

@PostMenWithACat

Honestly, you could probably buy all this in Aldi for £100. I fought against it for a long time then it completely blew my mind when I did my first big shop in there! That would be a saving of £4000 a year for you, surely just a change of supermarket would be worth that?

That list I could get for £100 easy in aldi or basics morrisons. You don't need to spend & 200 per week.

I work full time and eat "well" but never needed to spend anywhere near £200pw for 4 people, what a weird excuse for "needing" to.

I’d also buy most of those things on PostMenWithACat’s list within my £300 budget, though obviously not all of the cleaning products etc every week. I don’t include alcohol in the budget, that would come out of our personal spends. Although ‘veg’ and ‘fruit’ is very broad and would look different for everyone. For us that would be a bag of basic carrots, couple of heads of broccoli, onions, mushrooms, salad stuff, peppers, green beans and then the odd butternut squash, pak Choi etc depending on the meal plan. Fruit would be 1 bunch of bananas, bag of apples and oranges or pears and then a couple of punnets of berries or grapes per week. The odd melon or pineapple. Nothing pre-prepared or hugely fancy. We rarely buy ready meals or expensive children’s snack type things.

As for the £40 per person thing - I believe that is for a single adult and does not translate to £160 for a family of 4, certainly not with 2 DC. It costs relatively more to shop as a single person. If I was spending anywhere near £700 a month I would absolutely be eating a far less healthy diet than I am now!

OP wasn’t asking about how to cut her food budget down though, and if someone is happy spending more for convenience or whatever that is absolutely fine. I was one of the posters who mentioned my budget of £300 but I wasn’t suggesting OP or anyone else should be cutting theirs down. I was merely comparing outgoings with the OP as our incomes are similar but we save more. I also work full time and including commute do 4 x 12 hour days, but I have a DH who is home before me and loves to cook so we don’t need to go for convenience. We managed to reduce our grocery spending when money was tighter and now we know we can eat well on that we’ve kept the budget the same as our salaries have increased (though we spend more on eating out now). It works for our family. If another family gets more benefit from allocating more of their money to food shopping, then fill your boots

Interesting comments about Aldi. We have one quite close and I have tried it and found I couldn't get everything I needed, the car park is quite small and there are always queues into it, but the overwhelming issue for me were the ergonomics at the checkout which were awkward and low and having recovered from a broken back and with some disk problems I wouldn't risk it.

Re the comments about not buying things like bin liners, bog roll, shower gel every week, I disagree - with 4 adults at home every day we get through 8/9 rolls a week, and a shower gel and bottle of bleach. The bin liners yes probably not weekly but there are ones for the caddy, the caddy bin, the kitchen bin and black sacks. Peril I grant you but if it isn't Persil it's dishwasher tablets or viakal, etc.

If Aldi were on the right side of the carriage way I'm sure I'd stop off on my way home from work for some things from my list but it isn't. If I didn't work I may have more time but I didn't particularly like Aldi.

If any of you live near me I'd happily pay you £25 a week if you can bring my list in for £100pw by the way.

@PostMenWithACat our Aldi (not sure if all) have started a click and collect service, costs £5, if you want to give it a go. I admit I find shopping in Aldi stressful so I haven't shopped there for a while, but it's undeniably cheaper.

@PostMenWithACat I hope all the adults are chipping in too!!

I’m with @PostMenWithACat on Aldi

I did Aldi shopping when on maternity leave to save money but I had the time to do that as I didn’t have a day job to go to

I would always have to go to another supermarket to get other bits and I would find my wastage at Aldi far higher than my usual supermarket as some things were great but some things were dreadful and tasted so bad they were barely edible

We focus on low waste so only buy what we need so might splash out on some tasty ingredients but nothing really gets left behind and that keeps our shop down

It’s partly due to living in a small house as we don’t have the space for stock piling loads of food so what’s in the cupboard and fridge lasts us the week

Ultimately it's about how one choses to spend one's money and we never have a takeaway or casual meal out so food spending is swings and roundabouts imo.

However I agree with others op that you do need a spreadsheet and agreed out of pocket expenses with consultation and agreement if those budgets are exceeded by for example treating other family members to holidays.

As far as we are concerned we don't combine finances. DH pays community charge, utilities, insurance, household maintenance, his car and paid the DC's uni rents; I pick up the food, my car, stuff like linens/towels/kitchenware and pay the cleaner.

Happily we both have similar views about spending.