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?

I think this is key and where we've really started to notice a difference in the amount of money we spend, previously we'd have a takeaway every week, go out to cafés at the weekend etc but it was just adding up and costing us about £30 a pop!

A bit begrudgingly (but needed to be done) we decided to cut right back on getting meals out and just shopping at Aldi or Lidl. Also doing a few really cheap meals every week.

So our mid week dinners we try to make a few of them really cheap meals (jacket potatoes/pasta/soup and crusty bread/egg and chips type meals.) Then our weekend we still treat ourselves and do something that means I don't have to really cook but it's pizzas from the supermarket just shoved in the oven, or hot dogs or something like that.

We're two adults and two young DDs and my shop today for the week was £50 at Aldi and we don't need to spend any more on food this week, that included loo roll etc. Admittedly DDs get a hot lunch at school/nursery (free for DD1 as she's in Reception) which really helps and means I'm not too worried if it's beans on toast for dinner again!

So if you are budgeting for 'around £300 per week' that's where you are going wrong if you are spending up to that amount as some months are 5 week months. You need to go back to your budgeting and pro rata your salaries by 12 versus weekly food shop X 52, divide that amount by 12.

As someone who has a husband who works at Tesco, we do big shop on payday weekend of things like dry goods, meat for the freezer and cleaning products when the discount is higher. It's only a little extra saving but it all adds up.

I agree with one big weekly shop, and depending on your wifes shifts she could perhaps take advantage of purchasing yellow sticker items to be frozen.

Can you reduce your car use in any way. Are you driving short distances that could be walked?

If things are walking distance we will walk but most things aren’t.
However, next year our son will get 15 hours free childcare.I’ll look at ditching my car then and will cycle to work.

£300 a week is a good amount of money, £1200 a month.
Open a Monzo account and set up 'pots' for food so put your £400 in there when you're paid. Some weeks you might not spend the full £100 and the leftovers accumulate so you could have a take away or treat one week. Do a freezer and cupboard inventory and make a meal plan based around what you've actually got in. Then meal plan there on in. If you're really on the ball then you could do a months meal plan! Include cheap nights like a jacket potato or omelette. Plan meals like a roast chicken on a Sunday, use leftovers for a curry on Monday, that kind of thing. I have read on here where people seem to have a golden chicken that makes about 4/5 meals 😬 Bulk out things like chilli and spag Bol, stews etc with veg or chickpeas. Batch cooking is also cheaper.
Another 'pot' for petrol - you could have 2 pots, his and hers. Again, any unspent carries over.
Even if you did £100 a week on food and £50 each on petrol you'd still have £100 a week left/£400 a month which is a nice tidy savings pot.

Why wish I had £300 a week to live off I get PAID £300 a week but I have ALL bills to pay with that and have not a penny left every week