Our most expensive month ever

turbo

Most of our bills are paid monthly and we manage OK, but this month we have had three large unexpected bills in three days. I know we should have money set aside for such things but we haven't.
We have £200 for replacing garden fence posts and panels damaged in gales.
£400 for car repair and £750 for 2 pairs of glasses for husband. These are always expensive as he has to have special frames and glass for safety reasons.
Just having a moan really.


Turbo

Barneysmom

I know what you mean - it's like when you do get some money, you can't spend it as something big always crops up...and things run in threes as they say?

turbo

Exactly Barneysmom , unavoidable expense and not really items you get pleasure from.

Turbo

LilacPixie

Ouch. It's horrible when that happens. For me it was 3 tyres on our 2nd car 2 weeks before christmas. almost £300

velrist

Mine is usually the other way round, when I think I can afford to spend a little money on something fun/extravagant, two weeks later something will go wrong that cost roughly the same amount as I would have spent. It's happened so often now that I tend to wait a month before buying nice things if I can!

This month's unexpected outlay was £50 for a burst pipe!

dancingfairy

That's rubbish isn't it. However now you have identified these areas - the car repairs and the glasses maybe you can start putting a small amount away each month so next you're not caught out again - the gales though- not really much you can do about them except aim for a small emergency fund I guess if possible.
It doesn't help having them all at the same time though does it?
Hope you can sort things some how.
df

turbo

Thanks Lliac Pixie, velrist and dancingfairy for your replies. I am going to set up a standing order for an emergency fund.

Turbo

JasX

can you not get glasses fairly cheaply online thses days, remember reading that was going to be the death of high street opticians when they first started launching....?

VanillaDelia

I think its the same all round, people got paid early before Xmas and have to live on that for an extra week or so, we had car tax, driving licence photo renewal and dentist bills to pay out, we are skint and payday isn't till a week on Monday either, food is running very low and my parents have had to lend us £40 to help us through and we are on a strict budget as it is due to being on a DMP, also with it being so cold our electric meter has needed more credit.

Roll on normality at the end of this month, where nothing extra is needed to be paid.

VanillaDelia

JasX wrote: »

can you not get glasses fairly cheaply online thses days, remember reading that was going to be the death of high street opticians when they first started launching....?

I agree, when my husband needed new glasses last year, he picked some out in the opticians and tried them and left with his prescription, I found the same classes on ebay which were ex display and got them for £4.99 (opticians price was £80), his lenses are expensive as he has a strong prescription so we shopped around and found them cheapest at Asda, so we saved about £150 in total doing that.

Its worth looking into next time.

mehefin

If you are just having new lenses its perfectly possible to reuse existing frames. I have done it several times.