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Just flicking through the big mortgage thread and reading quite a lot of people have 35/40 % mortgages, and state they get by etc.
Our mortgage is 20% of take home yet we still manage to spunk the rest away each month. I swear it all goes on food shopping and I'm not even that fat (ish).
Lemon Bon Bons ?
I find its the little things. The coffee here the beer there, the old steel roadbike on tuesdays ebay bonanza that will make a nice winter roadbike once i have taken off all the perfectly serviceble components and put on some shiney new stuff.
go back through the last month via online banking schedule out into categories where you money is going; then work out where you want/need to reduce. we were like you. I always said their was a hole in our account. once we had done this I saw I was spending around £150-170 a month on lunches! so started making my own. There will be loads of ways to save
I honestly have no idea.
I spend a lot on 'stuff' what that is varies from month to month, clothes for this, gadgets for that etc etc.
I am currently having a month of logging all my expenses on my credit card to see where that all goes. At the moment mostly to tesco for food and petrol, the train company for my monthly train ticket - planning to do a season ticket shortly as I am now permanent.
We often say this, but then ask why we want the money? To spend on 'what we want'? well, thats where its going!
Its like when you think you've got no spare time. If you had any spare time, the chances are you'd just spend it doing the stuff you are probably already doing!
work lunch prices crept up and up and before we knew it it was 5 quid a lunch - or 100 a month.
Cut that back to about 10 quid a month just by making a pot of (what ever veg is on supersix) soup and a loaf on sunday nights. - healthier too .
OP you have children. QED
My mortgage is only just over 20% of my take home pay to and I still end up with nothing saved most months. I started doing a day by day finance tracker and it ended up showing I spend a lot more than I would have guessed at Tesco (like £400-500 a month in total) and then a couple of random purchases (£100 here and there on bike bits or random crap from Aldi I didn't need etc.). Maybe a non-monthly bill or two (car service, home insurance etc.) taking another couple of hundred and it all just disappears.
I really do wonder how some people manage on much lower salaries or much higher mortgages than me but I guess part of it is you adapt your spending - I could probably cut out £400 a month on spending with just making better decisions, wasting less and not buying crap I really don't need (I mean how many sets of screwdriver heads or drill bits or sockets does one person need...) - I just wish I had the self-discipline to do it now (I'd probably be mortgage free if did)
I run my own business so I don't have a salary, I just get what the current cash flow can spare - so I know it mostly goes on paying staff. Why they can't work here for the love of it, I have no idea! 😉
When I do have a stable income again I shall set up a standing order into a savings account so it doesn't get frittered away on cake.
Car insurance
Motorbike insurance
Home insurance
Life insurance
Pension
Council tax
Swimming lessons
Car loan
motorbike loan
credit card
Petrol to work/stuff
That's a grand taken care of a month right there.
Our mortgage is 20% of take home yet we still manage to spunk the rest away each month. I swear it all goes on food shopping and I'm not even that fat
I have just started using [url= https://www.moneydashboard.com/ ]Money Dashboard[/url] as I, like you, cannot understand where all my money goes every month – so much so I sometimes actually feel depressed about it. I work hard, take home a decent salary, my wife works and also takes a salary from my business, cars & running expenses/phones paid for via the business, our mortgage is pretty manageable (around 28% of take home) and we don't spend much on going out, clothes etc.
But today I have 83p in my personal account with 6 days to go until pay day.
When I do have a stable income again I shall set up a standing order into a savings account so it doesn't get frittered away on cake.
I try to save a quarter of my salary every month, by pushing it to another account every month.
Sometimes it gets dipped into, sometimes it doesn't - but I try not to have too much frivolous spending in a month (e.g. keep it to 5% of take home).
We also have a separate account which we pay all household bills from. We each fund that by paying in another quarter of our salaries, which easily covers the mortgage & bills so that's another buffer.
The other 45% I just waste on cake.
Work lunches were a big drain on my finances, £5 or £7 every day, then you have a coffee and a cake, easy to spend £200 a month on that.
Then you have a few "well, it's only £15" type purchases in the shops, a few "well, that is a bargain" purchases online and you've blow another couple of hundred. It really is very easy.
The other 45% I just waste on cake.
I spend 45% on cake. The rest I waste.
(With apologies to George Best)
I try to save a quarter of my salary every month, by pushing it to another account every month.
I do this - and i pushed it up and up to leave about 50 quid in my account by the time all the monthlys are paid.
i find by actively having to go move money to buy things it makes me consider do i really need it ......
be very careful signing up to money dashboard.
check your bank permits aggregation services - many if not all (when i last checked) uk banks prohibit it under terms and conditions - they may be relaxing now.....
but if your T&Cs prohibit and you give a third party aggregation service access - your compromising your rights to fraud protection.
Tread carefully.
My money is funding my early retirement
2016 is the year of buying nothing for me. Try it, it's very very hard. We're down to minus something ££ every month which, given the age of our boiler and state of our roof tiles is a perilous situation.
Apply:
Do I need it?, Do I want it?, Can I afford it? To every purchase over a self imposed limit (£5 here). You'll find if you're totally honest to all three questions you won't buy much. It's strange at first but stick with it.
I've not bought anything other than food, fuel, and bike consumables. Still down to £0 but at least it's in the right direction.
Coke and Hookers. Obviously.
be very careful signing up to money dashboard.check your bank permits aggregation services - many if not all (when i last checked) uk banks prohibit it under terms and conditions - they may be relaxing now.....
Somebody told me, and I may have misheard, of some pending legislation that will require banks to open up account information to 3rd parties (with customer agreement, obvs). (These laws already exist elsewhere - iDeal in NL, if anyone's familiar with that.)
This month?
car service 330
car insurance 245
motorbike tax 82
bike bits 235
motorbike service this friday, probably 300ish
🙁
Coke and Hookers. Obviously.
binners, you're forgetting the most important thing...
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The Money Saving Expert Budget Brain is pretty good for analysing were your money goes.
Several people have mentioned lunch spending, I've always been amazed at how much people will spend for lunch at work then claim they haven't got any money. It's generally not healthy either.
We spend a lot on our supermarket shop, we like nice food and we used to drink alcohol most nights. The alcohol spending how now been replaced by baby stuff.
My wife spends all of her maternity pay of her mobile phone bill and coffee / lunch with her mummy friends.
No lunch spending as such here as the legend that is mrs ws always makes me sandwiches. Just fruit for morning break at work now as I'm going to spending a fair chunk of time in the office managing as opposed to on site physically working, that said I couldn't believe how much I spent on fruit during this weeks food shop. I'm sure we must be spending money we don't need to, but then I start to think, four phone accounts at 20 quid ish each adds up. Sky, dog insurance, frandom things that just go out each month etc
Thing is we actually own our car unlike a lot of folk these days who have loans/lease. Definitely need to have a recalc!
Of my take home
36% on bills
34% into my savings account
30% for food, socialising, treats etc
In my case, this month's money has all gone to Indonesia where some b*****d has taken it out at a cashpoint using a cloned card.
mogrim - that is bad. hope you get it sorted
Best decision I ever made was to incorporate little 'saving pots' into my monthly budget. I put aside small amounts each month for, among other things, car service, kids' clothes, birthdays, car tax, swimming lessons etc. This way I've managed to avoid those regular big hits that wipe you out for a month.
I'm still skint by the end of the month though but it's nice to look at the couple of grand in the pot account and know I have a buffer.
mogrim - that is bad. hope you get it sorted
Cheers, claimed off the bank, but of course it's "15-20 working days" until they get it done. And then start claiming back all the charges and whatever else I've been hit for in the meantime. PITA basically.
Most of us are guilty of at least spending our disposable income each month, it is so easy to spend money through online shopping and paying with virtual money.
For example, since spending £395 on my Wazoo in Feb, I spent £50 on bits from PX in one of their many 2016 sales and recently £90 (or at least it will be when I finally get my 20% refund!) on a set of Jumbo Jim's and FR super light tubes.
After a few years when money was very tight, it has been nice to start treating myself to stuff and save a little, after my better half started working last summer. 🙂
Bikes beer & Women then the rest I waste.....
But seriously, I save 70% or my wages, once I build the new bike that's it just consumables, I tend to have a splurge now & then re stock etc, then it's usual house hold stuff, No loans nowadays but it's amazing where small amounts of cash go on nothing.
I'm mostly pretty good but then I have a bit of a spree, not usually big items, but it doesn't take all that many treats @ ~£100 each to knock a hole in the budget. A family day out, a meal, some bits for the van or the bike.
I'm also good at persuading myself that whatever I've just spotted on ebay is a total bargain, that I've been looking for one for ages, and I'll never find another. Boom, I now own a tandem. Etc.
All our money goes on school fees and insurance policies 🙁
Just had a £1,250 MOT bill! That's more than a month's pay already and I haven't bought anything to eat yet...
Where does all our money go?
I often ponder this as I share a nightcap with the butler.
I have no idea ,and neither does she.
Still,we want for nothing and the ballifs aren't at the doors yet.
Jolly good.
Early retirement.
MTB and road cycling trips abroad.
Carbon bikes.
Bike maintenance.
Coffee.
The rest I just waste
The money is wasted the same why my time is - making sure the kids have opportunities to find what talents they have and then help them develop them.
I'm not sure they realise yet, but they are my pension plan.
The Kids it seems, only this morning the eldest declared he needed Wellies for his school trip, "oh when" I asked - "now, today". So that meant a urgent trip to the shops before school - that'll be £20 for a pair of Wellies he'll use once, and I didn't bat an eyelid so used I am to just peeling off money to keep them in 'things'.
Anyway, our rent is 11% of our combined income, our only debts are my Wife's Graduate loan - which represents 3% of our combined income. The rest of our bills, food and fuel is another 15% so our total outgoing is less than 30% of our income, that's it - we could get by if one of us lost our job suddenly without a single missed DD, I wouldn't even have to switch to a cheaper brand of Muesli (Dorset Cereals FTW!)
We should be footloose and carefree, money to spare, cash to burn, but we're skint most of the time - the other big one is childcare - it's another 15%, that should at least go down a bit when youngest starts school nursery next year and fall to next to nothing the year after - but the rest is a death of a thousand cuts with kids, they seem to just burn through money at a really alarming rate without noticing it. Still they're worth every penny, and happily (for me) we can't afford some hellish Spanish Costa package holiday every year out of term time, so I don't have to suffer that.
Just flicking through the big mortgage thread and reading quite a lot of people have 35/40 % mortgages, and state they get by etc.
Mortgage + insurance is 85.6% of my take home pay. 😯
That's why my wife works too!
Officially we have no inflation but looking at a few bits and bobs, there seems to have been some downsizing going on in recent years (Yazoo milkshake still £1 but 400ml instead of 500ml = 20% effective price increase.
In 2008 I bought a 3-year old Ford Focus for £3.5k, equivalent now is c £7 or 8k
So I'm slightly dubious about official figures - you may find even if you're buying the same stuff in the weekly shop, downsizing would mean you go through it more quickly and have to replace it more quickly = higher overall monthly cost.
I was self-employed last year and cut my spending right down as a result as I didn't know how long the money would keep coming in for. Now I'm back in a perm role, earning much less, I spend more - basically up to my salary (after savings)... we spend what we earn. Very difficult not to.
Recently started to ride to work most days and take my own lunch in. That's saving me over £200/month, which is pretty significant...
We've got used to a very high level of material wealth and I reckon if we really challenged ourselves we could all easily live on 20% less by cutting out a lot of stuff that we don't really need...
Horse2
Mortgage
Horse1
In that order.
I have a camper conversion to do this year but I've saved for that.
The rest is frittered away on lunches/impulsing ebay purchases.
My bike related spend is actually very low (all my bikes are over 10 years old) probably the biggest spend is clothing. (for cycling, I only go shopping for normal clothes once a year!)
This is a pretty interesting article about REALLY saving money - made me think about what we need to spend to get by (look also at the referenced blogs)
http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2015/nov/26/black-friday-buy-nothing-day
We've got used to a very high level of material wealth and I reckon if we really challenged ourselves we could all easily live on 20% less by cutting out a lot of stuff that we don't really need...
This x 100. I think if most people really tried we could halve our food bill alone, never mind other non essential things. I guess it depends a bit on where you are in your life and what your goals are. Its all very very well to scrimp and save to pay for something that you will enjoy but we also work hard so it is nice to enjoy some of the benefits of this.
Where does it go?
Beer. I love it, and can't get enough of the stuff.
About 10 years ago I began taking a more structured approach to personal budgeting, soon reduces your spending on fast food, forgotten direct debits and pointless car journeys.
Now my biggest outgoings are (in order) retirement planning, mortgage, family food/clothes etc, holidays, contigency saving, utilities/insurance, buying stuff, alcohol.