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?

Elliott, thanks for not being shocked by our figures. I think I just need to grasp the bullet and not whinge about all the things that we won't be able to do, when of course I have so many more options than a lot of people.

Madonna has recently been moaning about the congestion charge - you'd think the odd thousand pound wouldn't really register on her radar. There is nothing so offensive as someone with a high income whinging about money !!

Do many of you have life insurance - DH pays for both himself & I - (I am a SAHM) and it must come to at least £150 a month - it is a lot but we consider it essential.

GillW - yes, I know what you mean about too many clothes - I often take a load to our toddler group & sell them on for fund raising!

Mum2Toby - party, you must be joking, I'm too mean to buy a new dress! (Will make my own cake though!)

Lindy

On top of Life cover for both my DW and I we both have Critical Illness cover and I have a policy set up to pay for my DD's childcare should my DW die and also a policy to pay my DW a monthly amount for as long as she has DD at home or till 18.

Then there is my pension and my DD's pension (yes DD's).

All in all it comes with the houshold insurance to well over £175 a month.

SH - yes, we also have a pension for DS, his child benefit goes in there!

My DH always refers to my life insurance as his swedish au pair fund ........ he's only half joking!!

I have been finding it quite an eye-opener seeing how much full-time working couples pay for child care. You do need to have a pretty hefty income to justify it.

kaz, I am very worried about your interest-only mortgage, at £1200pm it must be for about £200K (?), how are you going to settle it? Or do you hope the price-rise equity will take care of it for you and then move somewhere cheaper? I just mentally added up your outgoings and you seem to have a monthly surplus of £2K, where's that going?

I'd never totalled our insurances - just did it and they come to £141 including house, car, mortgage and life but not including pension. (We pay £36 a month to the building society for redundancy/sickness cover, it would pay all the mortgage plus 50% on top for other bills in the event of a catastrophic problem - not sure how long for though!)

Our house insurance is about £40 a month, 2 years ago our washing machine (in the bathroom) flooded the kitchen with hot water for hours during the night, brought the ceiling down and ruined some cupboards and all the kickboards, I think getting that fixed and redecorated paid back at least what we'd put in!

I have just worked out my biggest expenditure - £26000 per year on Income tax/NI. Oh my goodness...

Janh - well we won't stay in our current flat as it is only has 2 bedrooms and no garden and the mortgage is for a lot more than £200K !! Not sure how much equity we have in the flat but it must be about £100K.

I take the attitude that we won't be shelling out for such hefty childcare costs in a few years which will make a huge difference in our income and our ability to clear our debts.

Where does our money go ? There are quite a few things that I haven't added now i think about it - travel ( upto £100 pcm ), cleaner £200, additional babysitting 9 £7 per hour ), my book habit (£50 pcm) And the rest - who knows into that proverbial black hole of meals out, days out with DS, presents etc.....

I stand to inherit a reasonably substantial amount of money, though not for many years yet as parents still both very active and well - which I suppose also clouds my judgement.

I know that we need to make substantial lifestyle changes but find it difficult as DP is so s*t with money it beggars belief. I can't limit his access to our cash as he needs credit cards for expenses on trips abroad.
But am going to try and sit down with him again and get a handle on our expenses.

Kaz, I'll look after your DS for £2200 a month! Fantastic.

Yes we do have life assurance, enough to pay off the mortgage and some to live off.

8KTOO, by my reckoning that means your tax/NI bill is only just over 20% of your gross income. Pretty reasonable I'd say (in fact I pay a higher percentage on a much lower income - so much for progressive taxation - you must have a good accountant!)

Rhiannon - our fab nanny only gets just over £1500 or that, the rest goes in tax and national insurance.

THanks for the offer but I'm loooking forward to looking after DS !!

8KTOO - no surprise but also tax/NI is our biggest expense and I would be surprised if it wasn't for nearly everyone much above minimum wage level. DH has a negative tax code which is, of course, fair and reasonable because he is driving around in a brand new family car and not even paying for the fuel.

Elliot, it's 34% of my gross salary, I don't have an accountant and I don't try to get out of paying tax as I think it's fair.

100 pounds on walking a dog!
really.

cello lessons.

tennis club membership.

100 pounds on wine.

entertaining.

really.

Sorry, custdy.

However to justify at least the tennis club; it also has an all-weather soccer pitch (it gets a tennis net in the summer.) My kids have nowhere else to play - we do not have a garden - the nearest flat football pitch park is across town and full of doggy doo - tennis club membership gets them a key for the door to the all weather pitch so they can kick a ball around in the winter.

Re cello lessons - what can I say?

D'ya wanna know what pi$$es me right off?? Probably not, but I've had some wine so I'll tell you anyway:

I earn £10 per hour. My colleagues (who are fully trained) earn £25 per hour. However, they pay less tax than I do!!!! I don't mean less percentage.... I mean less POUNDS per month. How can that be right????? Well they are all registering themselves as ltd companies and paying their partners dividends and a few other little tricks that I shouldn't mention!

HMPH! I'm going for a top up of wine.

mum2toby - what do you do? can't you make yourself ltd company?

For those that are paying for Critical Illness cover, you may want to check the small print.

A good friend of ours has had back luck over the last few years being hospitalised a few times etc.

Each time his Critical Illness policy has not paid a penny. It was quite expensive so he decided in the end to just put that amount away in a savings account instead and at least he knows that will definitely pay out when he needs it.

Northern Lass - I work for an Oil&Gas Company, being trained as a Planning Engineer. I have looked into it and it would save me money, but not as much as it saves them coz they are on the higher tax rate. Also, it would affect Maternity pay when I decided to have another.

ok for the financially stupid please - i mean v. stupid.

can anyone register as a LTD company and get a tax break? do you have to earn a certain amount per month or year?

on a 20 grand wage how much are you likley to save?

ta much to anyone who is savvy!

M2T,
Whilst there are theoretically still plenty of "tax minimisation opportunities" out there, the taxman is clamping down on them pretty heavily at the moment. There has been a lot of stuff in the financial press indicating that the Revenue are actively attacking any arrangements where one spouse does the bulk of the work for the limited company and yet the other draws a healthy dividend. And unless you work very independantly for a number of different clients, you wil probably find that you still have to pay PAYE anyway.

A few years ago I would have said that most contractors would have been better off setting up limited companies, but these days the route isn't that tax-efficient unless you can meet fairly specific criteria.

Actually Custardo I don't think that spending 1.25% of your take-home pay on keeping your dog happy is too much. Having a baby and a full time job I do sometimes find it hard to fit in walking the dog. It costs £8 a day and I have the walker 3 days a week, the other 4 days dh or I walk the dog.

And £100 a month on wine is £3 a day! (I underestimated that a bit I think.)

Janh I think that if you can afford them Cello lessons are a damn fine thing. If you can give your child the gift of music it will enrich his/her life enormously.

Custardo, I will try and very clumsily answer your question (DH is bed so I cannot ask him). I believe anyone can register a limited company, although it does cost a small amount of money. I believe once you are a limited company you can (if your employer is willing) invoice your employer for the hours you have worked (full hourly pay before tax & NI) and it is then up to you to sort out your tax & NI, you can then set off the likes of travelling expenses etc against your tax and take a tax free dividend (although I don't know what the limits are on this type of thing) you then obviously as a self-employed person have a tax return to complete, tax to pay and your NI payments to make. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable could explain this better, I'll try and ask my DH for more details tomorrow.

Doh, just read MiriamT's post that perhaps answers your question Custardo!

all sounds very complicated!

re the dog walking and wine, obviously its no expense to you to speak of - or you wouldnt do it right!

sometimes its hard for me to imagine people spending money like that.

only £3 a day for wine... sometimes i dont have a spare £3 a day for anything.

dont mean to critisize, just when you havent got - it can seem like a waste