How much left at end of month?

[clockworks]

I'm self-employed now, and drawing on a couple of company pensions, so it's impossible to know exactly how much I'll be earning each month. Pension money covers the basic monthly bills of £650 - direct debits, food and fuel. Mortgage was paid off about 15 years ago.

Self-employment profit is averaging around £1200 a month before tax now - business has been growing steadily over the past few years. I save £550 a month to cover annual bills (car-related, holidays, heating oil and HMRC), and generally have a few £k to carry forward each year as a (growing) safety net. I have enough saved to keep me going for the 4 years until my state pension and company pension enhancement kicks in, so I could pack in work tomorrow.

Whatever is left over gets spent on the house, cars and hobbies. I've got a lot of stuff that I could "cash in" if the need arose.

I don't earn a lot ( around £22k in total projected for the current tax year), but not having a mortgage, rent or any loans helps. I guess I have a surplus of around £900 a month on average, and I spend about half of that on "toys".

[brickwall]

magarta said:

Recently worked out what me and the missus were spending on food and had a bit of a shock. It's paid out of 3-4 accounts so it wasn't easy to spot (business acc, my personal, her personal, my credit card).

Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):

Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340

The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.

Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!

Christ.

£500 on Ocado initially seems not that crazy - £150 per week for a family shop. But it’s very high when that really is only buying you dinner 3-5 nights a week!

£350 per month on lunch and breakfast: £15 a day? I work in the City so can see how you get to £10 lunches, but £15 every day is chunky.

And if the Ocado bill is £150 per week, why do you then need another £65 per week on Gousto and takeaways? That’s a killer.

You could easily reduce the total bill by £400 per month and not really notice.

[trowelhead]

magarta said:

Recently worked out what me and the missus were spending on food and had a bit of a shock. It's paid out of 3-4 accounts so it wasn't easy to spot (business acc, my personal, her personal, my credit card).

Per Month (2 adults, kid & cat):

Ocado £500
Me lunch and brekkie £350
Missus lunches £200
Gousto £140
Friday Takeaways £150
Total £1,340

The above doesn't include the lunches out on a Saturday/sometimes also Sunday.

Needless to say we've had a very serious chat...!

Easily done

Mine was about the same as this until very recently

Mine was deliveroo though. Shopping at aldi now saving a fortune

[designforlife]

Ten days until payday, £108 left in the account... looks like i'll be eating out of the reduced section for the rest of August!

[Integroo]

The discussion around tracking etc is interesting. I get paid tomorrow, but I have no idea how much money I have left from last month's pay. I shift a few grand into savings on payday, plus a third of my pay into our joint account, then spend on my credit card for most of the month, moving money out of the joint account into the current account when it is something for both of us (for example, dinner out).

So at the moment I have 2.6k in my current account, 300 quid in ourjoint account and 2.5k on my credit card. However, I moved some money out of a savings account into my current account as I closed the savings account, so it seems that I probably spent a good part of a grand more than I initially left for myself in my current account. This month we had a few nice dinners including a lunch at Heston's, I treated myself to Sonos surround sound kit, and paid 250 quid for an inspection on a TVR I didn't buy - so that probably makes sense.

Still, it would probably make sense to track my finances more closely. I would probably be shocked how much we spend on booze, nights out and random crap we don't need.

[ben5575]

Food wise for family of four (we/I cook all our food from scratch bar the pizza):

£65/wk 'Big Shop' at Aldi = £260
£15/wk Asda pizza on a Friday night (oh the highlife) = £60
£20/wk assorted top up stuff = £80
£12/wk me lunches = £48

So around £450/month and that's with us watching what we spend rather than just buying what we want.

Excl booze say +£100/m

Eating out/take away etc couple of times a month on top of that.

[Bikesalot]

Fonzey said:

We do Hello Fresh for four nights per week (2 people) which comes in at about £42/week. T

Gousto is cheaper at £34.99 for four meals - PM if you want to give it a try, I have a referral code to save you 60% off the first box and 30% off your first month.

I've tried both Hello Fresh and Gousto, I found the meal choices to be a lot better on Gousto.

I'll echo what another poster said about the convenience of Gousto / Hello Fresh - isn't saving us any money but cuts down on the amount of physical shopping needed plus we get to try food from 'around the world' and certainly a lot of stuff we would have never thought about cooking.

[ben5575]

Bikesalot said:

Fonzey said:

We do Hello Fresh for four nights per week (2 people) which comes in at about £42/week. T

Gousto is cheaper at £34.99 for four meals - PM if you want to give it a try, I have a referral code to save you 60% off the first box and 30% off your first month.

I've tried both Hello Fresh and Gousto, I found the meal choices to be a lot better on Gousto.

I'll echo what another poster said about the convenience of Gousto / Hello Fresh - isn't saving us any money but cuts down on the amount of physical shopping needed plus we get to try food from 'around the world' and certainly a lot of stuff we would have never thought about cooking.

How do you find the portion sizes? Are they small, reasonable or the sort of man sized portion that you would cook yourself? I want to cut out the man sized portions of my own cooking and be sensible, but then I've never met a recipe book yet where 'Serves 4' does much more than two of you. Can I feed a teenager on it?

[Fonzey]

Bikesalot said:

Gousto is cheaper at £34.99 for four meals - PM if you want to give it a try, I have a referral code to save you 60% off the first box and 30% off your first month.

I've tried both Hello Fresh and Gousto, I found the meal choices to be a lot better on Gousto.

I'll echo what another poster said about the convenience of Gousto / Hello Fresh - isn't saving us any money but cuts down on the amount of physical shopping needed plus we get to try food from 'around the world' and certainly a lot of stuff we would have never thought about cooking.

Cheers, I've done a few Gousto trials and hopped back/forth. Generally I preferred the convenience of Hello Fresh and they way stuff is packaged up, but I'll probably give them another try soon especially as that price difference seems to have opened up a fair bit!

[Fonzey]

ben5575 said:

How do you find the portion sizes? Are they small, reasonable or the sort of man sized portion that you would cook yourself? I want to cut out the man sized portions of my own cooking and be sensible, but then I've never met a recipe book yet where 'Serves 4' does much more than two of you. Can I feed a teenager on it?

For Hello Fresh it varies, some of the pasta dishes seem huge and other times you server something up and you could easily nail both meals yourself.

Generally have "emergency deserts" in the house and you can survive!

[boyse7en]

Reviving bit of an old thread, but I'm trying to find a phone app equivalent of the spend-tracking spreadsheets some people in this thread have developed.

Really what i want is for an app to look at my bank account, pop up a notification when i spend some money and then I can allocate it to a category (e.g.. car repairs, fuel, house repairs, etc).

I'd like to get a better grip on where my money goes after bills etc are paid. So I know how much my motorcycle costs me to run per year, for example, or how much I spend on garden equipment.

Any recommendations?

[designforlife]

The barclays app has this built in, albeit well hidden, if you happen to bank with them?

[deggles]

boyse7en said:

Reviving bit of an old thread, but I'm trying to find a phone app equivalent of the spend-tracking spreadsheets some people in this thread have developed.

Really what i want is for an app to look at my bank account, pop up a notification when i spend some money and then I can allocate it to a category (e.g.. car repairs, fuel, house repairs, etc).

I'd like to get a better grip on where my money goes after bills etc are paid. So I know how much my motorcycle costs me to run per year, for example, or how much I spend on garden equipment.

Any recommendations?

I'm currently using Money Dashboard as it's free, it does basic categorisation or 'tagging' of spend and helps track multiple bank accounts. There's loads of others out there to try though:

Yolt
Money Hub
Emma
Cleo

etc.

[trowelhead]

boyse7en said:

Reviving bit of an old thread, but I'm trying to find a phone app equivalent of the spend-tracking spreadsheets some people in this thread have developed.

Really what i want is for an app to look at my bank account, pop up a notification when i spend some money and then I can allocate it to a category (e.g.. car repairs, fuel, house repairs, etc).

I'd like to get a better grip on where my money goes after bills etc are paid. So I know how much my motorcycle costs me to run per year, for example, or how much I spend on garden equipment.

Any recommendations?

YNAB if you want to do it yourself

Or the easiest option is to use Monzo - move some money at start of month and spend on it - it will automatically match up your spending to categories for you and do spending reports broken down by category - simples.

[95JO]

NatWest do this too nowadays, we have a current account with them for joint bills, works well.

[djc206]

95JO said:

NatWest do this too nowadays, we have a current account with them for joint bills, works well.

They do but it’s seriously dim witted. My union membership came under transport, professional guild membership under eating out and my monthly DD to the Red Cross is apparently shopping and a tremendous amount of stuff just gets thrown in ‘other’. Obviously you can change them to the correct category but doing that for a lot of expenditure would become tedious after a while.

[95JO]

djc206 said:

They do but it’s seriously dim witted. My union membership came under transport, professional guild membership under eating out and my monthly DD to the Red Cross is apparently shopping and a tremendous amount of stuff just gets thrown in ‘other’. Obviously you can change them to the correct category but doing that for a lot of expenditure would become tedious after a while.

Yeah it did get a few of my DD’s wrong, but after updating the category it’s managed to sort itself out the following month.

[okgo]

Where in the Natwest app is that?

[djc206]

okgo said:

Where in the Natwest app is that?

At the bottom, select ‘spending’

[okgo]

djc206 said:

At the bottom, select ‘spending’

Ah yes.

That's garbage.