£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

quintwins · 1 August 2017 at 10:49AM

I also save a small fortune during school holidays but thats because I normally spend £80 a week on desil to ferry my kids about. Since they got off school on the 29th June I've spent £90 on desil and that got us to airport and back aswell. Food wise my kids take snack to school and then £2 for funds a week and £4.80 for swimming easily covers the extra food they eat.

We tend to aim for free things and long walks, 2 of our kids have sensory issues so alot of the time quiet is best.

Treadingonplaymobil · 2 August 2017 at 3:48PM

OMG I am a soggy little camper. Lovely weather for the middle of our camping trip, but set up and pull down days have been crazy! Nonstop rain and gales this morning, and DH was at work so I had to do it all. Luckily the DCs could sit in with my parents while I got everything sorted. I have that pleasing sense of achievement one can only achieve from doing something outdoorsy in terrible weather though.

Going to start rounding up my July numbers in a tick, once I've defrosted with yet another cup of tea.

Treadingonplaymobil · 2 August 2017 at 4:12PM

July roundup!

Right, have finally sat down and calculated the numbers, and the debt total currently stands at… <drumroll>

£55,243.13

So we're down £3,365 in total, with a monthly reduction of £578.49. I’d love to see bigger monthly reductions, as it just highlights how slowly it’s all going down, but (as I always say!) at least it’s going down rather than up.

July roundup
Would it be a total shock to you all to discover that one or two of the same culprits reared their heads again?
Food - a truly horrendous month, thanks to some ridiculous top up shops. £559, over £200 over budget. I am basically having a total sulk over this. I feel at a complete loss with it without massively compromising the wholesomeness of what we eat.
Family kitty/entertainment - I’m pleased to report a huge improvement here - the weekly pots really concentrated our minds. Down to £178.07 from £219 last month and £239 the month before that. At least something is working.
Fuel - a great month for this, bang on budget
House stuff - A category that we have a tiny budget for and regularly overspend. £143.10 this month (budget is, erm, £20). A good chunk of it was bath soak stuff (DH and I go through epsom salts and lavender oil like it’s going out of fashion, as we both find long baths help with post-exercise soreness, so we bulk buy every few months), another £20 was tupperware for the DCs’ lego, £30 was on final bits for the front garden fence. So nothing dramatic, but it all adds up.
Holiday stuff - we bought rucksacks, one new coat, socks etc for the DCs, and walking boots for three of us (I think the other two may need boots before we go, sob), so a lot of expense here.

Big win
This isn’t really a big win, but I’m really pleased to report that we finished the month with £228 left in the savings account, for things like the car service, Christmas present etc (all the annual expenses, basically). This is the first time we have ever had money here at the end of the month - it has always always been used up to top up overspends. This feels like (yet another) milestone in our journey - the longer the journey, the more milestones, perhaps, as we seem to hit new ones every five minutes. Or possibly I am just very quick to congratulate us :rotfl: . If we can manage to leave more than £228 in there by the end of August, I will be very pleased.

Another interesting point
Is just how much exactly we spend each month. In July we spent £3,999.14. Based on the previous few months that's a fair to middling sum (worst month was nearly £4.5k, best was c.£3.7k). It will be good to keep an eye on this overall big picture number as well as the smaller ones. Our ideal budgeted outgoing is £3,168, so we've yet to come in anything like on budget.

So July was average. Food was, as ever, a total Debbie Downer on our budgets, but other than that we didn’t embarrass ourselves too badly.

Treadingonplaymobil · 2 August 2017 at 4:25PM

August Aims

1. Pay some extra off the MBNA card - I'd like this card gone asap. More than the £15 I managed in July would be nice.
2. Find ourselves with more than £228 in the savings account on 31st August.
3. Keep that overall spend figure down below £3,900 (baby steps!)
4. business planning and scheduling, so that I am ready to start making some immediate profit in September when DC3 starts preschool.
5. think outside the box with the food budget and keep a close eye on anywhere it might be going wrong.
6. Try not to need the child benefit money to balance August’s money, so it can go towards Septmber’s (it is paid four weekly, which is currently falling towards the back end of the month, so I have balanced the budget to work without it, and will aim to put it towards September’s income rather than August’s. We’ll see).

quintwins · 2 August 2017 at 4:26PM

I think that's a great month, you will get there with your food budget over time and your not going to need those houses stuff again soon so might even manage to save in the next few months (btw you can get Epsom salts from home bargains, epsom baths are really good for you so totally justified) and everything else was a win!

Kantankrus_Mare · 2 August 2017 at 5:52PM

I had never really heard of epsom salts for easing aching muscles.
Do you use a combination of that and the lavender or on its own?

Well done on the progress you have made this month. Dont be too despondent about the grocery overspend. It takes a long while to bring your weekly shop spend down through trial and error.

I try to bulk buy non food items when they are on offer, use a few ingredients from my allotment to make meals cheaper and try to make a lot from scratch. We still manage to go over the £100 mark each week and thats just for two sometimes three of us. (We do like to eat well and my 6 foot 3 OH eats his weight in food.) My daughter still lives at home but tends to sort her own food out a lot of the time.

Silver_Queen · 2 August 2017 at 7:21PM

Epsom salt baths are absolutely wonderful, no judgement there.

About your grocery budget, have you tried picking up some recipes from the old style moneysaving section, or Greying Pilgrim's thread? I find that Greying's daily recipes always look delicious, are wholesome and she has a very very impressive budget.

Personally I can't talk because I spend at least £100 a month on lunches, snacks and weekend main meals just for me....

helsbell · 2 August 2017 at 8:07PM

Since the weekly pots for entertainment seem to have helped so much, maybe you could adapt the system for your food budget.

If you break the total down weekly for your main shop, you can then set an amount per day for top ups. Anything you don't spend that day rolls over to the next day so you can spend yesterday's money but not tomorrow's, iyswim. And most of the things in a top up shop can wait one more day, can't they? (At least, if your top up shops are the same as mine anyway!)

emmie26 · 2 August 2017 at 9:47PM

Wow that's a fab month. Well done on the savings :T

Cherryfudge · 2 August 2017 at 11:49PM

Lovely to have you back!

I haven't tried Epsom salts and maybe I should because sometimes I hobble like a good 'un a couple of days after a run! However what's helped me most with aches and pains after exercise is stretching. A friend who's a sports coach is very helpful in diagnosing where my muscles need work - not in terms of strengthening but stretching, and a couple of areas seem completely cured after a few applications of specific stretches. To my great surprise, as I'm fairly flexible, my left side had arm and hip problems that I put down to age/weight but were actually all about shortened muscles. Just wondered if that might be an issue if you go on having aches despite getting other things right?

Re healthy food on a budget, well... I can't talk, I've spent madly recently.

However, there are some very old threads that I found both fascinating and helpful, by someone called weezl74. I think eventually she set up her own budget foods website for a while. Her food aimed to match the requirements for nutrition set by the US Government. I found one of her threads here.

Hope you have dried out and warmed up now?

£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

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