Money Advice Please

[Dave20]

So I work in transport as a HGV driver on £28k so works out £1800 take home pay.
Dear wife earns £850 a month take home , she works 20 hours for a supermarket.
We have two young children and get £145 a month on child benefit.
So a total monthly income of £2795, family of four, two young kids as mentioned. We have a mortgage.

So after all our bills have gone out we are left with just over £1200 a month to live on. That’s obviously £300 a week. This is before food shopping and petrol.

We’ve tried to cut down on bills. We cancelled our British Gas home over which cost us £20 a month. We phoned Sky to get our bill as cheap as possible and got that down to £40 a month- with broadband.

Last year we took out a loan of £10k for over 6 years to pay for some much needed home improvements. We also budgeted for our youngest sons childcare, so we had to put away basically 4 k of that to last us for 2 years of paying for childcare.

Our energy with Octopus just went up from £130 a month to £190. So £60 a month extra over night.

We shop at Tesco ( we don’t get on with Lidl and Aldi) plus dear wife does get 10% off her shop with staff discount. They also say they price match Aldi on lots of products.

So anyone else in a similar boat? Living off £300 quid a week to pay for fuel and petrol and anything else we need.
Any tips?

Any advice from anyone ?

I think 300 a week left for food and fuel is a good amount.
Do you meal plan? Would that help?

We’ll just week we decided to meal plan- we did this until a few years ago and then kind of stopped.
We also now just started to do a weekly shop on a set day and stop doing top up shops every other day. That’s seemed to work out expensive.
We both run our own cars which isn’t cheap even though they are old cars- not financed.
Id love to get rid of my car, but I have to factor in collecting our children from nursery and school in set days,so it’s a bit of a logistical nightmare otherwise.
We both work local to where we live.

For what it’s worth, I think HGV drivers are underpaid.

Running two cars is expensive. Is there no way you can arrange your timetable to manage with one between you? Could your wife alter her days / hours? The one who isn’t driving the kids cycle?

At least you will soon have £400 credit on your energy bill.

I’m afraid I would be ditching Sky altogether.

£300 PW does sound reasonable though.

Tesco are good value. Especially if you get 10% off!

What are you eating? Packs of Chicken thighs in Tesco are cheap, and in a tray bake with potatoes and carrots, and some broccoli on the side, make such a good value meal. For example.
Any number of pasta dishes.
Frozen fish fillets (not the battered ones, the salmon or cod pieces).

Get rid of sky and pay for cheap broadband.

Dear wife has already changed her shifts around, twice in the last year. There’s not really any other way of ditching one of our cars just yet.
There are higher paying HGV jobs out there but mines Mon- Fri and finish at 2.30pm every day. If I wanted to earn more I’d have to travel further and pay more on fuel and wear and tear. Also means longer hours. I’ve only just started my new job too.
We don’t buy branded foods. Mainly Tescos cheapest products.
We tried ditching Sky too but we’re still in contract with them for a while yet.

We have similar income/outgoings/family size and like you have been through bills, got a better deal with sky etc. We kept sky as the deal we got was cheaper than Internet alone with other providers and also included Netflix. I really haggled with them.

Our heating is switched off and we only drive when necessary. We are lucky to only need 1 car and WFH mainly.

We meal plan ruthlessly and batch cook. We budget £100 a week for food shopping and take that out in cash each week. Its much easier to see where the money is being spent when you use cash.

All very boring but it does help with overall budgeting. We manage to put £200-300 a month into savings.

Have a look on TikTok for the £35 for 5 meals for 4 people ideas/deals - you can still get the shopping at Tesco but some great cheap delicious meals to make

Look at reducing your direct debits to as few as possible

I just have council tax, utilities for gas and electric, water, internet//phone

house insurance, aa cover and car insurance goes each month into a separate bills account (all the bills come out of one account - which is a total then divided by 12) to be paid in full each year - as its cheaper that way.

At least having a bills account there are no surprises

then a savings pot

If you can reduce your car journeys then you'll save fuel costs, get the bike out for anything less than 5 miles, anything less than 1 mile walk and only use the car for anything more than 5 miles

I’ve just checked if you are entitled to universal credit. You are about £83 over the entitlement figures if that’s correct take home figures ( after tax, ni and pension).

Do you have any childcare costs.

Just seen you do ( sorry) how much is that a month?

Our childcare costs are £160 per month. We get tax free childcare, saving 20%. I believe most people get that.
I didn’t think we’d get universal credit as we earn too much??..

I think withdrawing £100 a week for food shopping and paying in cash is a good idea.

I earn £28 k per year and dear wife earns just over £11 k.
I don’t think we’d get universal credit..

Actually you would. You’d get around £53 a month. However you can’t have tax free childcare and Universal credit so really depends which is the better saving the 20% or the UC - especially if your childcare costs go up in holidays.

I think withdrawing £100 a week for food shopping and paying in cash is a good idea.

just open up another joint account and put the £100 a week in by transfer, its easier than cash, if you wanted you could put in £75 for the weeks shopping on a Friday and Tuesday put in a top up of £25 if you need to

If you had been claiming UC back in May you’d have been entitled to the cost of living payment ( you won’t be now)

You could get cheaper phone and broadband too.

UC allows you to keep the first £573 if your combined earnings then takes into account 55% of your earnings.

I'm just away to open a Monzo account just for any food stuff and nothing else.
Transfer a set amount for each week a month.

Used to do cash and it worked well but stopped in the last 2 years.

Not sure how transferable the skills are but can you re-train as a train driver? It does require shifts but only ever a reasonable length week and the pay is over 50k I think once qualified.

I’d love to be a train driver and yes I’ll consider it! Quite competitive thought I believe, hard to get into.

When do we all get this £400 energy discount? I’ve heard October, but energy could go up then again , so try £400 saving won’t be enough for most struggling.

It’s impossible. Just working to survive. All I can suggest is enjoy the things in life that are free! Can’t just keep reducing outgoings for ever. More and more people who work are living in comparative poverty.

Look at married tax allowance. If your earnings are below the threshold for paying tax you can transfer the "unused" portion to the spouse that does pay tax (and you can backdate it).

Yes, we’ve been claiming the marriage tax allowance since about 2016…

£300 a week is plenty. That is more than I spend of food and petrol and that's for a family of 5 with 3 teenagers. Meal plan and don't buy top-ups, once it's gone it's gone.

Yes- one big food shop and no top up shops is the idea. Cutting down on treats- no trips to McDonald’s, the chip shop etc etc.