Off to a shakey start.....

hackedoffatthem

For those who budget, please could you help me!

I have budgeted £50 per month for our car expenses..... first payment to the pot was August. However, my car tax is already due for the end of August and will be approx £200!!! So what do i do? I will already be over budget- not a great start and will throw other things off track. And surely this means i will always be playing catch up?

Another question...... do you move the money you save/budget for things into other accounts....ie i am starting a christmas/birthday fund too and unsure whether to leave it in our current account or more it into another (unused current) account i have?

Thanks for any advice you can give xxx

WRINKLES

hackedoffatthem wrote: »

For those who budget, please could you help me!

I have budgeted £50 per month for our car expenses..... first payment to the pot was August. However, my car tax is already due for the end of August and will be approx £200!!! So what do i do? I will already be over budget- not a great start and will throw other things off track. And surely this means i will always be playing catch up?

Another question...... do you move the money you save/budget for things into other accounts....ie i am starting a christmas/birthday fund too and unsure whether to leave it in our current account or more it into another (unused current) account i have?

Thanks for any advice you can give xxx

You have no choise im afraid you can not drive your car without it being taxed , start again forget christmas , birthdays , get your priority bills, debts , under control first , then think of saving for luxurys, giving a present is a luxury , good luck.

Marisco

Just get tax for 6 mnths, so it won't bite too much into your budget. I tend to agree with Wrinkles about Xmas pressies and birthdays, but if you feel you must put something away, then yes, I would put it into another account. If you put it into your "working" account, it will get swallowed up on other things.

Lula-Hula

Hi,

I'm an avid fan of having various saving 'funds' for future expenses, however I feel it only fair to pass on the words of wisdom that another poster told me :

It will take up to a year to see the rewards of your efforts at saving up for things.

The main reason for this is because whatever time of year you start your 'savings', there will always be a major expense that you havent had time to 'save' up for.

I am now just seeing the reward of the past year of 'savings'.
I paid for my car tax with the paltry £10 I had put away each month. I have just paid for the MOT the same way.

I do have a separate 'savings' account & on each pay day I transfer the amount I need to 'save' into it.

To give you an idea, I 'save' towards the following future costs :

Car tax, Mot & service, gas & electricity, presents, childcare ( I am fortunate in that I only need to pay during holidays) my daughters clubs & trips, I also put away £30 each month for emergencies.

It is generally considered to be wrong to 'save' while in debt, but I consider it to be good money management to put away money for future bills. I could pay my gas & electricity by monthly direct debit, but that means the credit I amass during the summer sits in the utility company's bank account rather than mine and that they are in control.

The surplus & 'savings' also double up as another form of emergency fund in case of need. One of my windows recently got broken in a freak accident. It cost £87 to replace & thanks to the funds I had the cash. Without the fund it would have had to go on a credit card. I find I am a lot more keen to repay money I've borrowed from my funds than I ever have been to repay my CCs. I guess that's because I'm borrowing my own money rather than a banks

As to paying only 6 months of your car tax, do check whether you have any other major expenses due at the same time. Mine used to run out at the end of November which was rubbish for me, so I did 6 months just the once & then started the full 12 months from May & it did give me a chance to start saving up towards it.

When it comes to things like insurance & breakdown cover, do remember to use a cashback site such as www.quidco.co.uk or www.topcashback.co.uk.

I do save for birthdays & christmas presents as I can afford to & still overpay my debt, but by completing surveys & earning points or vouchers or paypal credits, I have also managed to seriously cut down the cost of presents too. I recently 'paid' for 3 cds for a birthday present with Amazon vouchers earned from surveys.

It's quite incredible just how much difference you can make to your budget once you spend some time on this site & try out different tips.

Wishing you lots of luck

xx

WRINKLES

I like it , good advice from Lula Hula .

bouncydog1

You could try setting up a year's worth of spreadsheets so that you can see when major expenses are due rather than them coming out of the blue.

I would run one as the savings sheet and one as the day to day. Each month you put your money onto the savings sheet/separate account so you see your nest egg building up but you see when you need the money to pay the bill.

Absolutely everything goes on there and I also run an additional weekly budget sheet which links into the main sheet so I don't have loads of small items on the main one. Anything underspent from the budget one week gets carried forward to the next and if there is anything left over at the end of the month, off to savings it goes.

property.advert

The trick is to get rid of any one off things which you have to pay and not to push these into your calculations going forward. So if you have to pay your car tax, do it now and then budget £10 a month going forward to pay it next year. Same with insurance etc.

You cannot budget for bills due now but only for bills which are either spread out over the year (do not use insurance like this as it costs you interest) such as your utilities etc.

Marisco

My oh does loads of surveys, so Xmas costs us nothing:) Some are money and others are vouchers. I also save all my Tesco vouchers for my "Xmas shop", so the Xmas lunch costs nowt either;) I do a couple, but that is to feed my book addiction with Amazon!!

hackedoffatthem

WOW!!

Thanks for all the advice!

I've had a think!- Going to get 6 months tax so it will be due again in Feb (always used to do this-have no idea why i stopped!) so that it will be on a council tax 'free' month and therefore the yearly cost will be less difficult to stretch to.

I'd like to be able to put something away as December is a busy month for us and we always enter January depressed. I have my husband's, eldest son's, my mum's and 5 other close relative birthdays in December plus Christmas with our 3 and our wedding anniversary! So even if we do it on the cheap, which we do, then it still all mounts up. Plus i'm self employed and like to take some time off at Christmas which of course means no income although i do budget for this to an extent.

We've got an account each which we don't use so i will use mine for Christmas, holiday funds etc and hubby's for the cars fund. Would it be mean to take his debit card for that account away from him? Not that he has a money problem or anything but to reduce temptation?

Thanks again for all your help- I'm sure i'll be back to ask more since this budget malarky is all new to me! I'm lucky our income does cover our outgoings quite well but it just needs lots of juggling about!

hackedoffatthem

Oh one other thing..... sorry!

I do online surveys and get paid in luncheon vouchers which we save up to buy food when we are desperate! However i'm hoping with a good budget we won't need to do that now so i was thinking of saving (as above!) them for our christmas shop. Only problem is they get sent to me in denominations of £1 and 50p which can be a bit embarressing presenting £20-£30 worth at the till. Do you just have to suck it up and hand them over (watching the people in queue behind roll their eyes and huff and puff!)????

AndreaE

The spreadsheet idea is a very good one.

I have a spreadsheet which shows me all known income and expenditure from now until the end of next year. Of course some of the amounts will change as time goes by but it has been so useful to me in showing me exactly where I stand and I feel far more in control than I ever have before.

Every month I used to go overdrawn and then would have money later in the month when my child support payment came through. By entering this all on a spreadsheet, I could see that simply changing the day each month that I paid gas, electric, phone etc from the 1st to the 15th meant that I wouldn't be overdrawn - this had never occurred to me until I saw it all on a spreadsheet.

Also, when you are making a few ££s with surveys etc. it can all seem a bit pointless (a lot of time for little income) but when you can enter the occasional extra £5 or £10 to the 'in' column on your spreadsheet it is surprisingly satisfying.

Good luck,

Andrea