How much do you budget/spend on “fun money” per month?

[Coffeecoffeeinmytummy]

DH and I are always overspending on this category. I think it should be enough and yet somehow it never is.

We have 2 DC age 4 and 2. We have a funny arrangement with childcare/preschool/work shifts meaning that there are only two days a week when they’re both in childcare. 3 weekdays at least one child is with one of us, and then we’re all off together at the weekends. I mention this because I think it’s the extra spending on our week day days off that’s really adding up.

I budget £475 per month and that is meant to cover pretty much all “unnecessary” ie luxury day to day spending such as —Eating out either as a family or individually eg if DH or I go out for drinks or a meal with friends. We maybe do this as a family once a month and maybe once a month each separately for me and DH. Roughly £120 total?
-Days out, not including fuel but any other costs incurred like entry, train or bus fare, extra food or snacks
-Activities or random stuff with the kids that aren’t a regular class ie DD does a weekly dance class and this is paid by termly direct debit so it’s not in this budget but if we take them swimming, or go to a cafe or buy ice creams at the park it would come from this pot
-Any non-supermarket food eg if we pick up a meal deal for lunch. Or general random shop spending like getting kids a magazine or buying craft stuff
-Me occasionally getting my nails done £30 once a month average
-DH random spending on wanky craft beers or Apple Music. This is maybe £50 a month.

Doesn't include holidays. It feels like a healthy budget to have but we are frittering it away and it seems to mainly be on coffees, parking, bits and pieces that are only a few pounds at a time but are quickly adding up. Interested to know what others spend. I know it depends a lot on income - that goes without saying - and we are lucky we can afford this currently but we need to cut back.

At 4 and 2, the budget was virtually nothing (all our money went on childcare!). DH and I probably had a meal out with friends (separately) about once a month, but something inexpensive. Didn't eat out out as a family or have takeaways (or maybe once a year).

Activities with the DC would be free e.g. going out to the park f (yes, in all weathers) and taking our own drinks and snacks. We might have one or two "bigger" trips out in the year, but would try to pay for a chunk of them with Tesco vouchers or similar. Socialising was going round to friends' houses.

Reading your post it sound like you spend a lot on "random stuff" that you don't really even notice. We tended not to spend on random things and use the equivalent in a small number of more tangible spends.

We split things up a bit more, so that there’s more clarity on what we can afford, and where the bigger spends are. So from your £475 budget we’d have different pots for

Family spending:
Entertainment & days out
Parking & petrol
Eating out & takeaways

Personal spending:
me
DH

Anything DH & I did/wanted separately (meals or nights out with mates, nails, craft beer, whatever) comes from our own allowance. It doesn’t touch the family budget. Then if we can’t afford it we don’t get it.

Splitting out eating out & takeaways from the actual days out also forces you to think. Yes we can go swimming but if we spend the money on coffee & lunch then no takeaway next week. Yes we can go to that event but we’ll pack the picnic. Shit we’re running low on the parking & petrol fund this month so local trips only or we’ll have to steal from our personal allowances to afford a bigger trip. Etc.

If you’re struggling to make it last you need to break it down more into smaller chunks for different things.

There was very little to spend on fun stuff when DD was small but we still did loads. There are plenty of free places if you look. And wherever we went we always took a picnic. Bigger days out were saved for specific occasions and ticket's bought well in advance with coupons and/or early bird fares.

We spent a lot of time socialising with friends, outside in parks when the weather was good. Inside at each other's homes if the weather wasn't great.

We also spent plenty of time at home, playing, baking and crafting. Or just watching a film. You don't have to go out to have fun.

YNAB is the boss for this approach. I’m sure you can do it without but using YNAB really hammers home that money is finite and you can’t ‘count it twice’ and have to choose what your priorities are.

Hmm do you actually have any reason to need to budget on this? If not then there’s nothing to worry about. If there’s some financial pressure then quite honestly I would call your spending extravagant.
We have about £100 for 5 of us for a month

I think it is a case of going through your spending in microscopic detail. If you work out what you spend annually on something and what that would be over ten years that can help you figure out how important it is to you. Doing something less often can help too.

That might mean taking sandwiches with you unless it is raining heavily and you can't just have them in the car. It might mean your husband buying a craft beer every other month or you only getting your nails done in a salon for special occasions rather than regularly.

Thank you lots of good points. In fairness if we are doing a “big” day out somewhere like a beach or even our local farm park where we spend the whole day, we will always take a picnic. I’ve realised our spending is very weather dependent! If we’re going somewhere we’ll be outside anyway then a picnic is our default. We even sometimes will pop into a local supermarket to get a multi pack of lollies instead of paying £2 a head on ice cream van. However these weekends during the winter are just dragging on and on. We hate staying in too much because the DC just fight constantly (that’s a whole other thread, lol) so we just have to get out and our local options in wet weather are:
soft play - £11 for two DCs and you can’t take your own food/drinks
swimming - £14 for a family of 4, again can’t take in food
Local museum which is good as it’s free; you can take a picnic to eat outside but if you’re inside it’s in the cafe and again can’t take in food. I even got told off once for taking baby food because they sell Ella’s pouches there 🙄
Shopping centre which is obviously designed to make you spend ££!
cinema

Thats it really. We could definitely just go home for lunch or go out after but we’re always just trying to extend the time spent out of the house as they’re so awful at home. I’m hoping it’s a phase and that gradually the kids will fight less and we can do more activities at home. In the meantime though I need to research more local places where you can take your own food!

i might also stop getting my nails done..

Sorry cross post with several people!
@Nausrous national trust may be an option for the summer, assuming we avoid the cafe! I don’t know how many places there are near us though, I’ll have to check they’re not too far.
@HairyKitty yes as I said in my OP we are looking to cut back on our monthly spending for various reasons, it’s not life or death fortunately but currently we are spending over £6k a year on this stuff so i think it’s worth looking at!

@HairyKitty meant to add we are not in debt (other than mortgage and one 0% credit card we are on track to pay off on time) so in theory we can afford this but as a pp said the spending doesn’t seem to align with my priorities.

Where are you located op? If you give a general area people might be able to suggest places you could go for cheap or free.

We have roughly £120 a week... however....
That is for purely for anything unbudgetted. So take aways, coffees, tickets to places etc.
If I was having my nails done every week/month that would be budgeted separately. Same as petrol has its own budget.

You are bound to go over budget if you aren't realistic and honest about how the money is allocated.

DH and I also have an allocation of "our" money. So as soon as we get paid, a set amount is transferred to our own a/c for anything we want to spend on.... so if I wanted my nails done, it would come out of that. New clothes etc and if I don't spend it it's there for the next month.... don't tell my DH but I've built up quite a pot!!
Doing it this way means we really think about what we are spending on! Rather then just spending frivolously out the joint account.

My sister figured out she spent £2,500 a month on Amazon- mainly on small bits and pieces. That's more than our take home pay so no danger of me doing that but really highlighted how easy it is for fritter hundreds away.

Get and use a Revolut card and the app tells you all this month on month and let’s you set budgets with notifications when you get close to going over, and a percentage comparison for each category you set up to the previous month

@Coffeecoffeeinmytummy is it gel nails you have ? If so buying the equipment and doing it yourself will save you a fortune .

@mycatsanutter yes it is, I had no idea you can do it yourself!?! I assumed you really had to know what you were doing, and I don’t…!

@CantMakeHeadNorTail congratulations for having such a small mortgage 😉 ours is £1200 on a very normal small three bed semi 😭 I’m in the south east, prices are silly

@Coffeecoffeeinmytummy can you paint your nails with normal nail varnish without going onto your cuticles , sides of your fingers ? If so then you can definitely do your own gel nails . Have a look on Amazon at the mylee starter set

Wow those do seem expensive.
Most leisure centres will do a family membership in which swimming is usually free, infant isn't usually free for under 5's (was under 8's for us at one point). There are often heavily subsidised sessions for family swimming.

All of these were with this group

www.freedom-leisure.co.uk/promotions/

I know the Southeast quite well, where abouts are you ?

Same here. Mine are older now which means I have to drag them out of the house rather than the other way around! But we have a massive park and river walks nearby... and handily have a couple of supermarkets close so you can get snacks and drinks and a box of ice creams without it costing the earth. In the winter a lot would be spent on snacks and food etc in soft plays.

I always go out with water in a water bottle though and a few snacks in my pocket for my youngest. And when I had my first my mum very kindly bought me a coffee machine which must have saved me hundreds in coffees out!

Yikes, probably a lot more than that, but we also organise our money differently as we each have separate accounts for our "spending" money. I think in an average month I probably spend £500 or so, DH a lot more but he has expensive hobbies 🤷‍♀️

Do you all have decent cold/wet weather gear? You talk about the need to 'be inside' during winter, but it's been so mild and dry for the past few weeks that it's barely been like winter at all so great for taking DC to run around country parks etc with flasks and picnics to save having to do indoor activities with entrance fees and expensive food and drinks. But in any case, it might be worth investing in decent outdoor clothes so you can spend time outside without being controlled by the weather.

Otherwise, McDonalds coffee costs half the price of everywhere else, but I don't know if it's practical to take DC to McDonalds without buying food - perhaps get them a Happy Meal to share as they're small?

But it's definitely worth trying to limit what you spend on these sorts of things, even if you can afford it on paper as it can add up to huge amounts and, unless you've covered all essentials including a decent emergency fund, savings for things like car replacement, home improvements, DC university etc and your pensions, you can't really afford to be spending thousands of pounds a year on non essentials like these.

@BarbaraofSeville we do have decent enough gear but my kids are really not very outdoorsy. It’s frustrating because DH and I really are outdoor people and we love walking etc but we seem to have bred children who detest the outdoors! The older one does have an excuse of sorts - autism and hypermobility which makes her easily overwhelmed and she doesn’t like the wind or the rain (or water in general) and she tires easily. The youngest is just quite miserable when it’s chilly even when wrapped up warm. Maybe we need to get them more used to it!

We are lucky to have a reasonably healthy emergency fund of approx 4 months outgoings (assuming the SHTF and we cut back to bare minimum) and we have just bought a new (to us) car outright. But we need to cut our hours at work so our income will be dropping soon.

Get a fancy flask, fancy picnic bag and the kids some camelbak bottles. Make taking snacks & drinks fun and easy. I often sit in a small park in Westminster with a flask of my own tea because nobody can make good tea in Central London! 😂

I'm definitely not the only one with a flask either.

Stock up the cupboard with:
Mini Soreen
Wraps
Crackers
A treat each (maybe small Mars Bars or something!)
Babybels
Bread sticks
Raising / Fruit winder / Bear Fruit things

Do what it takes to make it easy to pack.