Surviving January

[Warbler1]

Hi,

so Christmas is sorted. Gifts are wrapped and fridge is full. Feel very grateful as I know this isn’t the case for everyone

I get paid on Christmas Eve and will pay off my Christmas credit card bill in full. I’ll also clear my Klarna and Clearpay. This means I will have £1200 to live off after bills etc.I’m a single mum with two teens.

I’ll need to buy food etc out of this. Sound right?

Depends what you mean by ‘food etc’

If it’s just for food and general bits and pieces, then that’s loads. But surely you must know that? You’d have to be pretty out of touch with reality to genuinely think that’s surviving’ in any sense of the word

You need Dave Ramsey's baby steps. It's very American but once you get your head round it you'll change your life.
https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps?srsltid=AfmBOorUvFKUId8V8DvptHhCCXguEnzUjZDaBi09qkj7RYTA_8eRN3CP
Also a single mum and was in debt my whole adult life until about 18m ago when Dave Ramsey sorted me right out. I now have savings and will never use debt again. Christmas has been budgeted for.

£1200 after bills sounds a healthy amount to me.

I have one teen, and, assuming no disasters, we'll spend £240 on food and £70 on diesel. We shouldn't need anything else.

Go through your statements and work out what you spend on a typical month after bills and see whether the £1200 would cover it and look at any bits that you could reduce.
I would get a stock then cupboard and freezer shop at the start of Jan so that if things are a bit tight at the end of the month you know that you already have stables in and you just need a few things to top up.
We have a monthly rather than weekly budget. We have a big shop one week where we go through the cupboards and work out what is going to run out over the course of the month - cleaning products as well as things like 3kg bags of pasta, 10kg bags of rice etc we have two average size shops for food for that week and we have an empty the fridge shop where we aim to leave the fridge empty by the end of the week and only buy what we need to turn that into extras.

Once you get through January I'd then look through your finances for 2025 and look for the reasons for needing credit and see what plan you can put in place for 2026 so that you can get through the year without being reliant on credit.