£412

[headaches80]

Hello everyone.

I’m quite meticulous with budgeting.
mortgage rate has gone up again. I’ve just done my forward planning calculation.

After all bills/ direct debits/ standing orders (all essential stuff like mortgage, energy, c tax, TV licence, life insurance) I have calculated that we have £412 per month left.

This is for food, clothes, gifts, any school trips and unexpected bills. also to include petrol.

I’ve not included the insurance (car, home/contents) etc which I tend to get annually (I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it).

I spend around £30 a fortnight on petrol (getting to work). I downsized my car to pay for Christmas.

How are you splitting your £412 in my shoes? This is joint income, 2 adults and two teens. Both adults working full time.

I’m thinking

£200 shopping
£60 petrol
£40 unexpected/ school trips
£100 left over (will get eaten up no doubt)

its not a lot :(

I know I can sell stuff on Vinted. I don’t have loads of extra to sell and intend to save this option for use ahead of birthdays etc, I made £200 recently ahead of sons bday.

I’m thinking of ditching the TV usage (making licence fee not nec).

if Martin Lewis is correct, I’ll save 17% on energy bills. This will save me an extra £42.50

Any extra income streams or savings that I’ve not thought of?

As a teacher why is 6% only £60 a month? In Scotland our raise has put me up about £280.

I used to tutor and loads of people paid cash in hand. I declared it all. But in the current climate, I wouldn't. When a family of four with two professional earners are heading towards foodbank levels of poverty, I think it's OK to be a bit free and easy with tax dodges. Sunak is!

Babysitting is lucrative, our teenage neighbour charges £8 an hour which is standard round here.

If you were willing to work for less per hour you could undercut the local market where you are.

If its older kids it'll probably involve overseeing bedtime and watching telly til the parents return so money for not a lot really.

My DH still has 12-13k left and I have 15k left in our late 30s.

You forgot to add on the living cost loan. Yes it’s 3k for uni fees but we also got 3-4K to afford rent / food so it was around 6-7k per year. We then did 4 years (I took extra in my 3rd year compared to DH hence the difference)

Could you do some care work over the summer? Or at weekends? If you work privately you can get paid about £18 per hour. (South east anyway-might be less elsewhere). I am doing this myself-3 hours a day 4 days a week and it's earned me enough to pay our gas and electric bill and a bit of petrol money, which we needed.
Or tutoring but you might want a break from the teaching!

Its absolutely grotesque and unfair that two people working full time should need to take on extra work just to be able to live. This fucking country.

If your children are now teenagers, you don't need the plentiful school holidays to care for them. Can you tutor, exam mark, work in a holiday club, nanny etc over the holidays? I know it's an unpopular opinion on MN, but in any other sector working the number of weeks a year that a teacher does would be considered part-time work. I work full-time time, which means 48 weeks a year and when my children are off school there are weeks and weeks of childcare that I need to find that my 4 weeks annual leave a year won't cover. Can you do something in this arena? The long summer holidays are coming up soon, which would be a great opportunity to top up your income. Even if you take a few weeks off you will still have a month of earning potential left.

£200 shipping is wildly unrealistic imo
I think you'll need at least £300 for that alone
You can't ignore the longer term stuff because you won't magic a lump sum up in the month you require it.

Can your teens work and contribute?

If OP is a lot younger than she says she must have had her first child at University unless the teenage son is an altered detail and then what was all that about driving lessons.

As a teacher, consider registering to do babysitting via sitters.com. They require dbs and checkable refs, which you have.

OP already said she altered details, so we don't know what is true in OP at all, DS1 may not exist.

Yes to both of these points. Absolutely NO to the body shop suggestion, what a diabolically bad idea

It's absolutely grotesque and unfair that two people working full time should need to take on extra work just to be able to live. This fucking country.

They could have splashed out on a 4 or 5 bed house though

Were you the first year of £3k fees?

I thought it was 2006 it came in. I thought the oldest you could be was 37/38?

I was going to suggest the too good to go app. Can be a bit hit and miss but I got a great box from Aldi a few weeks ago which was very varied and supplied me with dinner for the family that night plus a couple of packed lunches and dessert!

I still have student loan to pay, about £5k , I did a 4 year degree, family low income, no grants just loans. I also worked through uni to support myself. I didn't go straight into a graduate level job so wasn't earning enough to pay back, even when I started my first public sector job two years after graduating I was paying very little back because my wages weren't much over the threshold. I just checked and the interest rate is now 5.35%. The amount of interest I've paid over the years is eye watering. I graduated in 2007.

DH and I both work public sector and both do overtime additional on call and secondary sessional roles, not to make ends meet (it was for years) but for a bit of a cushion and so we can afford a modest holiday etc. I work in a management role and an just stepping up into a senior management role. The salary still isn't great.

Most of my team do the same regarding overtime etc.

Oh mine and DHs repayments are around £450 a month combined, plus pension at 7% (not complaining about that it'll be worth it in the end but reduces the money in your pocket)

The interest rate is 5.25% currently. Will rise to 5.5% soon, as it’s BoE +1%.

so for many years it was 1.1% interest. So, actually, you did alright for those years.

Well, it sounds like you’ll pay yours off within 3-4 years max.

If you’d gone to Uni 2 years later, presume you started in 2004, you’d have another £2k per year debt.

If you have no debt then it is presumably the mortgage which is crippling you?
If you are younger than one poster implied, can you extend the term?
You probably don't want to but it sounds like you are on it with budgeting so you could make it the longest they allow and then overpay. At least then you can have the odd month at a lower figure if you can't make things balance.

I would agree that your bills must be high. Money saving expert is very useful for suggestions of where you can shave money off if you post a statement of affairs.

Do you both work full time? I know public sector wages aren't great (in it myself) but on a part time public sector wage in line with teaching and a full time just above minimum wage, we pay 1k a month in mortgage, much more in petrol and have significantly more left over than you do (no benefits).

I would do a fine toothcomb through the outgoings and threaten to leave sky, breakdown cover, etc as it's amazing how much they can suddenly knock off, especially if you've been with them a long time

This doesn't really make sense. Your outgoings must be incredibly high. You both work full time and you are a teacher. I'm going to assume you earn 30k each and take home would be at least 3k a month even with fairly generous pension contributions and paying for your student loans. Your mortgage isn't likely to be over 1k a month as you can't borrow that much on 60k combined. So you are spending 1.5k on bills?

That’s going to be a massive struggle. Best solution is more income. Between you both I’d be working another job 2/3 nights a week. Not ideal of course but that’s going to be incredibly tight and £200 a month for 2 adults and 2 teens is going to be very hard.

This is the generational divide between X and Y, if you had a grant you know you are an X.

The mortgage is a red herring though isn’t it? You can’t take a mortgage holiday forever – at some point you have to pay it, and at that point the household income needs to have increased or COL come down, which isn’t going to happen.

And as for moving, she’ll need to stay in the same area for work/school for the kids, and even a small move might increase the petrol costs, and she’d need to guarantee the new house was as energy efficient as the old otherwise she’s swapping mortgage money for heating bills. Moving costs would be Conveyancing fees to sell and buy, stamp duty, estate agent, removals, plus all the odds and sods that add up when you move. Does she have that in savings? Or does it come out of the equity thus reducing the affordable mortgages she could get? And if she’s staying in the same area, most houses will be of a similar price unless there’s a significant change and she’s in a 5-bed detached period property – which would be helpful information to know – swapping for a 3-bed terrace, no parking so car insurance goes up when she parks on the road, etc.

Really the answer is extra income, but also sharing a breakdown of expenditure: what really is necessity Vs nice to have. I saw a thread here once and on the expenditure list as “necessary” it was like haircuts, nails, Sky, football season ticket, gym, mini breaks, pet therapy for an anxious cat, gardener, etc. Don’t think that’s the OP’s situ but specifics are helpful to see the gaps.

I think it’s not a realistic budget . You need to either cut a big expense or increase your earnings , is overtime possible ? Would getting an extra job be possible ?
hugs

i Echo the suggestion of school holiday nannying- we employed two in the past. Great pay and you will be a huge help to a family who need that. I paid £100 per day (net) years ago. I got my first one on gumtree but then advertised on childcare websites. Look for summer.

Why are people not deducting tax from ops salary? She wouldn't be getting paid 36 grand a year and then getting 3 grand a month take home, would she?