Living life, loving life.......hypno's having a ball!

taxi73

Sounds like a productive day..enjoy the rest of your weekend

hypno06

Had a good day with DS skiing....kept within our spends budget for the day so all good there too.

Just tired now - these early starts really aren't overly welcome on a Sunday morning

Hope you have all had a good weekend, and are recharging your batteries nicely ready for the week ahead!

x

rtandon27

Morning!

Sunny & bright here!

XO
RT

hypno06

Sunny and bright here too!

Have a good day everyone - the highlight of my day is that I am giving blood after work.....nothing more than that to report.....banking all ok, I'm ok, life's looking good.....:)

lucielle

Things you'll do for a choccy biccy. Well done its for a good cause.
L

hypno06

Not only that, but I can justify at least one cake or pastry or something similar beforehand.....just to prepare for the drop in my blood sugar levels

lucielle

That goes without saying!
L

hypno06

So......inspired by something that Souk wrote in her diary over the weekend, I have been looking at what % of my income goes where.

I am not sure if the results are surprising or not, but it has given me some food for thought, and as a result I have increased my long term savings, and have created a short term savings standing order, which is intended specifically for holidays.

In round figures, the table looks like this:

50% Household bills - including mortgage, council tax, utilities, house insurance, life insurance, and mobile phone bills.

5% Travel - cost of bus for me, DD's school bus pass, money allocated to car insurance/MOT etc

10% Long term savings - aiming to build a buffer for big expenses such as car replacement, help towards uni, emergency if I lose my job etc

5% Short term savings - towards holidays

10% Food

5% Petrol/Oil

10% Spends - this is to include the childrens allowances, my social life, spending on clothes and haircuts/waxing and the cost of the cleaner.

5% Slush....as invariably things don't work out in nice neat multiples of 5% :rotfl:

Hmmmm.......

This is, of course, a far cry from the days when my entire salary was taken up in debt repayment, with OH entire salary not even then covering the basic household expenses, so I am not, for one moment, going to think that times are tough. I've done "tough" and this is not it!

BUT there is a lot in there that gives me stuff to think about. I will ramble on in the next post.......

hypno06

Notes to the above - some are just ramblings, some are things I need to act upon.

1. This is worked out as a percentage of my total take home income, which currently includes my basic salary, my maintenance, and my child benefit. DD is now 17 and therefore I have to accept that a year from now it is very feasible for the latter of those two to reduce.

2. It does NOT include any bonus I may get from work, either at Christmas or in the summer. I never bank on a bonus, because they are completely discretionary. Should they materialise, however, they would be put to good use for things like holiday/football season tickets etc.

3. There are one or two very small savings I can make in the "household" bills bit - little things that have crept in, like an additional life insurance policy. I will go through and refine that list, taking it to the bare bones, but there is not a great deal that can be cancelled there, most of it being done when we moved house. It won't do any harm just to revisit though.

4. Food - This is a figure that can certainly come down by a £ or two. I have gotten out of the habit of meal planning, and my shopping is a bit hit and miss....with too many trips to the more expensive local shop.

5. Petrol - the cost of petrol keeps increasing, and some months I don't spend as much.....I want to keep it realistic though so that those busy months that include ski race travel etc don't come as an expensive shock.

6. Following on from the above, we do use public transport as much as we can, and DD's school bus pass does allow her to use it evenings, weekends and half term holidays (not the long summer hol though) too, which makes it a very cost effective item.

7. Long term savings - I have just increased this from 8% to 10%. If it is not sustainable at this level, I will bring it back down.....but at least the money is not being "lost", just being moved into another pot which needs serious thought before withdrawal because it will cost me in a penalty of loss of interest (and with it being an 8% regular saver, it is worth keeping).

8. Short term savings - I realised that I rely on bonuses etc for holidays, but that actually even if I don't get a bonus, we still need some R&R away from home. This amount will go a little way towards that, but wouldn't pay for anything more than a basic summer holiday - it certainly wouldn't cover a ski holiday. This is something I need to address because holidays are big expensive things and could easily be paid for on a credit card.....and I don't want to be going there. I enjoyed my long weekend in Rome, and I want to be able to do more of that sort of thing, for example.

9. The short term savings figure, however, has reduced the amount that I have previously been allocating myself for "spends" - ie the nicer things in life, that I have been spoiling myself with over the last year or so. I have taken it from that section because of course holidays and trips do come under the heading of "spoiling us" and "fun things". However, this does leave less in the pot for socialising, so I will have to give serious consideration to how much I spend on my Friday nights, for example. This is going to be a real test of what has become important to me.....

10. Skiing does not feature anywhere in this.....I still need to cover that, one way or another (some things just never change :rotfl:)

11. As you can see, whilst there is the luxury of having the ability to reduce the amount from the savings pots, the reality of it is that there is not as much slack as I might have thought. Especially when you consider that income from child benefit etc will be reducing rather than increasing over the next year or so. Also, it doesn't consider at all my desire to start overpaying the mortgage, which - according to the figures above - is probably a little way off just yet.

12. Coffees etc have to go I have to be more disciplined about things like that. The same goes for the random food spends when I am snacking - although I have been addressing this over the last couple of weeks.

13. Clotheswise - having lost weight, I replenished my entire wardrobe - this is not an urgent priority now, but does mean I cannot afford to put the weight back on as I cannot afford to replace everything again!!

14. Council tax free months of Feb and March pay for my car insurance which falls due in March. However, when DD passes her test, and with DS 17 next year too, this is also an expense that is likely to start costing rather more than 2 months' council tax!!!!

So.....a workable model, no room for complacency, no room to take the eyes of the ball, and more work needed on those little extra costs that have become everyday expenses that cannot really afford to be.

millionaire_in_training

It's all just a constant juggling act. I am forever re-assessing and tweaking my life.