Money, how much comes in each month?

[Rhiannon]

This is a rather touchy subject and I wanted to change my name for it but couldn't work out how to.

The question is, how much money each month comes into your household and out of that how much is your mortgage and other important stuff that has to be paid.

How much are you left with for food, meals, entertaining and clothes?

How much do you save for a rainy day and how much do you save for hoidays?

Rhiannon, I'm curious, why did you stop paying into pensions? Is is because they don't look like a good bet any more?

DH doesn't pay a lot in, we could increase the payment a bit now but we are wondering if there's any point and if we would be better putting the money somewhere else.

8KTOO, what work/job enabled you to go from 20 & 28K a year to 75K a year? It seems a huge pay rise.

janh, we put money into an Isa a couple of years ago, invested in an Invesco Rupert Bear account, have bought shares too. Everyone single one has lost money, in the case of the Isa I think we've lost about 30% of the money.

I have been really concerned about the pensions, my Dad had paid in for years and recently had problems with Equitable Life and he had other pensions that, when they matured weren't worth what he thought they would be.

I actually feel more comfortable just putting the money in a normal savings account now as we have lost so much. The Isa cost £7k and I think it's worth just over £5k now, that is gutting for me.

We stopped paying as I thought the money perhaps would be better spent trying to buy a 2nd property (something we haven't done but still hope to one day).

Not enough.

Not enough.

Not enough.

I'm curious - what are these big hot shot jobs that earn so much? Or are you both working ?We have 5000euro and I thought we were rich till we started paying 1500euro a month rent etc . It's expensive to live here compared to France. ( Brussels)

As some of you know I'm disabled and my husband is a student. We have £600 a month coming in from the income support I am allowed to claim for myself and DD. My husband is from the USA so is not allowed to claim anything at all. I also get £210 a month to pay for care and extra help needed around the home. Rent and council tax are paid for by my local authority. Oh yeah and the child benefit.

I couldn't tell you where it goes as each week is a juggling act and the only constant is food. We do pay for out internet connection as DH is studying computers and website building so its kinda essential. Hopefully when he is finished I can join you 8k ladies!

R - you asked a fairly straightforward question - so here's mine - what do you do to pull in £8K per month ?

variable because I'm self employed dh - 2.7k net , me sometimes 1.5k sometimes 4k depending.
All savings gone on new house - all spare cash now going on sorting out a garden.
1.5k on mortgage/bills
1.2k Nanny
1.5k visa bill (at least)
No savings at present but have flat let out instead on pension.

We bring home about £1800, sometimes slightly more:

We pay out:

Mortgage/endowments £400
Other bills £300
Food £200
Petrol £50

We normally aim to save around £200 per month, although this obviously depends on how many takeaways we have, etc! Our savings also go up and down alot as we're in the process of decorating our whole house since moving in 4 years ago, so most of our saved cash goes on it. Saying that, we keep about £3K in savings all the time, to allow for emergencies. I couldn't sleep at night without knowing I had something to fall back on!!

I think its very true that the more you earn, the more you spend, but we live pretty comfortably (although a holiday abroad wouldn't go amiss!)

We have friends who are childless and earn £50K per year plus, who are often 'skint', but obviously they have a bigger mortgage, 2 cars and expensive cars at that, a bigger wardrobe than me and probably whatever they buy is of 'better' quality than we could afford. For example, we recently needed a new lounge sideboard; we saw a few we liked in the shops which cost hundreds but eventually bought one that looked like new, second hand for £50!

So I guess you live to your means.

I find this really interesting esp to see that most respondants dont have much in way of pension provision (like ourselves- some but not enough), it makes me feel better to know we are not alone but I wonder what the best solution is? We had a large one off share payment and used it to buy a second home in france, the french property market seems more stable than the UK, no great rises but hopefully no crashes either. This will be our nest egg but any other ideas, have seen antiques recomended but kids would quickly cause major deflation in that area.
It is also true that the more you earn, the more you seem to spend on "basics". We too were in the £8k a month bracket but Dh has recently lost his job due to relocation, we have a years salary but want to cut back a bit to make the money last longer, but its hard to see where it goes other than mortgage and school fees (X3). We dont eat out more than once a month, never go to the pub or use babysitters really, holidays in french house/parents house Spain. I think school fees are the killer really- £40k salary (before tax)just for that really.

Rhiannon and 8Ktoo- Do you sell Kleeneze?

was this thread started by that harry enfield`s character that says "i am considerably richer than youuu"??

No one has explained yet how they manage to earn so much money....
I could really do with some tips...

OK feeling brave and in terms of this thread fairly average.
Income net.
DH - £1550 plus company car plus fuel
me (3 days plus on-call evening per week) - £1100
Child benefit for one child plus might eventually get that other payment thing....

Outgoings.
Mortgage (inc endowments - its half repayment/half interest only) - £700
Nursery - £325
Council tax - £140
Loads of other direct debits for utilities.
My gym (off-peak) - £24
Saving for Dh's golf plus other things - £65
DS's a/c - £15
Life assurance savings a/c - £42

We do not really have any savings at the moment but we bought a new car for me this year and paid in cash (ie used all our savings) and I'm planning on opening a cash ISA of £100 month to save for another in 5 years. We are slightly overpaying the mortgage to account for the endowment shortfall but agree with JanH's comments on Nagger's mortgage/council tax. No debts (even a credit card bill).

Shopping £50 a week.
Holidays save as we need to but haven't been abroad since before DS.
Couldn't contemplate affording private ed/health.
Pensions both company and taken off before that net figure.
Apart from saving for the car if I find that we can afford I think I will overpay more on the mortgage rather than save.

Interesting thread this one. Here are our measly monthly amounts.

Joint income £840.00 net
outgoings monthly
£214.00 Rent
£104.00 council Tax
£280.00 Food not including alcohol
£50.00 Gas and Electric
£20-£30 phone
£10.00 house insurance (contents only)
£67.00 Direct Debits
£16.00 Credit Card bill, that is just for the internet bill as that's all that goes on the one credit card that we have.

This leaves us with roughly £70-£80 a month left over which is put aside incase of emergencies or towards a holiday or any small house improvements.

The child benefit is put aside for dd to buy her clothes/shoes and pay for any after school classes like gymnastics and ballet.

WE very rarely go out anywhere, holidays are usually a cheap flight to London to visit family and stay with them so we don't have to pay accommodation charges.
WE have qualified for the new ctc and wtc but we aren't getting very much and since my hours will be increasing by a few hours very soon our credits will go down and our incomings will increase but we probably won't be any better off at the end of it as it will probably all balance out the same.
I pay into a pension at work £20 a month, dh doesn't have a pension. We'd dearly love to buy some property and rent it out as it seems such a good thing to do but since we don't even qualify for a mortgage for the flat that we live in just now there isn't much hope of that happening any time soon.

Here's hoping that we win the lottery soon, if only we could remember to put a ticket on, lol

My eyes popped out of my head Rhiannon and 8K too ...
I am glad you are nice people because I would be so jealous ...
Can't comment on our income as it is in NZ dollars and it is just silly money compared to UK money!!!

OK here's mine:
About 2,500 net (depends on dh's freelance work as well as my salary)

Mortgage 530
Food etc 450
Gas and elec 120
Phone and TV 75
Au pair 250
Clothes/shoes 120
Holidays savings 100
Petrol 100
Council tax 100
Insurance (car and house) 50

Not sure what else I have missed. We have small pensions but frankly I think they are not worth topping up. We have all our money tied up in the house and when the mortgage is paid will buy a second home to let - this can provide either income or capital when we retire or need money for the kids.

Feeling a bit jealous of others (and by the way I am at work today - Bank Holiday!)

I'm jelaous of the council tax amounts that people are paying: we have to pay £247/month (for 10 months) - and we're not even the top band!

It's not the council's fault - all the expensive suburbs, with some small exceptions (like where I live!), are outside the city boundary, so in fact the AVERAGE council tax bands for houses within the boundary is A! Obviously that has a knock on effect to those of us on higher bands (ours is G, houses worth roughly between £100 & £200k.)

I've just sat down to work this out & realise why we have a problem.

DH gets £1000 to £1100 per month. Out of that comes mortgage £470, insurances (life/mortgage/house/cars) £175, loans £300 & Sky/computer £46

I get £1000 a month, plus another £600 in extras (CHB, tax credits etc).
We put food, petrol (£70 pw) & any extra spending on the credit cards, which are up to about £20K (long story). Minimum payment now up to about £600 pm. (yikes)
Furniture etc on IFC £128, car loan £245, gas service contract £17, contact lenses £12. Gas/electric/phone roughly £100 each every quarter, water £120 pa, council tax £106. (band D)

We have no savings. I have a company pension but DH has nothing. Yes I am seriously worried & we are going to get a financial advisor to sort out the mortgage (part endowment) & the credit cards. What a mess.

DH sells security equipment, we had a business that went bust, we lost 25k which we had to pay back to Amex as it had a personal guarantee on it. Since then we closed the business down and laid off the staff (about 5) and my DH now works out of the loft at home.

We no longer pay rent for an office, massive staff wages (now just 2 and they work from home - one of those does telesales and she lives in Denmark!).

We no longer have the overheads that crippled us before. This allows us to take a bigger wage but does mean that DH usually works all hours and sometimes has to be careful not to email people at midnight as it would be obvious he was not 'at work'.

DH is far less stressed working from home and tries to manage his time so that he doesn't have appointments until 11 am to avoid the rush hour traffic.

Rhiannon, I can identify with your experience. We had a company and my DH's partner withdrew all the funds from the company account and put it into another failing company of his own.

We lost about £100K , three cars, offices, lifestyle, etc overnight. If it hadn't been for my parents who paid our mortgage and school fees for six months we would have lost the house. We were in negative equity for 4 years, so we sat tight in a tiny house with two rapidly growing children.

DH took on all the liabilities of the company and kept it going, we took on office again locally, but found it too costly.
DH then worked out of the spare room for a while until we converted the garage into an office.

We then made a very big jump to the present house, in which we now have two office.

Gone are the day of £2million turnover, and making a good profit, all we do now is enought to give us an income of £10k a month to cover everything.

DH runs a small management consultancy and works mainly from home, but troubleshoots companies and then charges out at £1200 a day. So if he works for only 6 months of the year as he did last year, we have enough to live on for the rest of the year until something turns up.

It is like living on a rollercoaster, when thing are up, we live the lifestyle, but we also know how to live according to our reduced income.

The children have benefited greatly as he always takes them to school, and is around a lot more than when they were little. I also think they need him more now, as teens.

There is a lot of truth in the more you earn, the more you need to earn as you spend more.

I count our blessings daily, it ccould always go pear shaped again, just like that.

hm - think I know who spendalot is...

pauper, I really identify with your situation, we have been in it ourselves (several times!) until fairly recently - were bailed out a couple of times by privatisations and re-mortgaging. It is dreadful being in that situation knowing it is getting worse every month, and kids don't get any cheaper to run as they get older!

Do you have some equity in your house? Could you actually increase your mortgage? If you could add your 600pm credit card debt (20K), your car loan (245pm - 10K?) and your loans (300pm - 15K?) - total 1145pm (45K?) - to your mortgage, it would cost you far less than 1145 pm over 20/25 years and the difference should mean you could stay solvent, especially if you get a low interest deal to begin with (and then do your best to stop using a credit card for your groceries.)

If you couldn't borrow all of it as mortgage, could you get a couple of new credit cards every 6 months and do balance transfers at 0% interest, then at least the monthly payments would be a bit smaller...

Good luck!

I also think I know who spendalot is....
Glad you enjoy the champagne lifestyle

I guessed who before her last posting....